What sort of Central Heating Boiler

The advantage of a smaller house,  and a rather warmer climate overall than we get up here!

We try not to be too profligate, but we have a lot of floor area to heat, our own choice of course to  continue living here.  

We used to have MIL with us and she had her own little flat, so we could move into that area if we fall on hard times.  At present we are heating mainly our bit, but do heat the "granny flat" for an hour or two per  day if it is really cold.

Luckily we are south facing, so when we get sun we need no daytime heating at all, and the solar panels help with the electricity useage.  The FIT will actually more than cover all the cuel bills once the cost of the installation is recouped, which will be another 3 years I think.

Looking forward to that!

How do your bills these days compare with those of 30 years back?  Assuming of course it is the same house.

Changing our supplier and changing our boiler have greatly reduced our costs this year.

We cannot really compare as we were both working then, so the house was empty during the day mon-fri,it must be cheaper now in comparison as we have been asked by others how we only pay such a low figure for dual fuel each month,the house is we consider, well insulated with thick loft insulation and cavity wall insulation,and all but quite old double glazeing 

In 2016 our boiler broke down and we had to wait nearly two weeks for a repair, although we thought our boiler was a bit of a work horse and would last forever we were wrong.....and it was in the middle of winter that we discovered the truth. 

We replaced a combi (18 years old) with a new 'Ideal' combi last year. Efficiency is greatly improved, an annoyance with our old combi was the length of time for hot water to appear at the taps, this is greatly improved by the new combi. The new combi has a preheat switch if desired, it fires the boiler at a set interval for a few minutes to allow hot water to be drawn very quickly through the taps.

The central heating side is much the same other than being more efficient in its use, it is also a condensing boiler whereas the older combi was not, this gives greater efficiency using waste heat that would normally be extracted.

Ours is a three bed house, radiators in every room, combi used for shower room, combi rated at 28kW and easily handles whats asked of it.

We went down the condensing combi boiler route when our old system gave up.If I remember correctly we were “given” a £400 allowance to change to this system under a boiler scrappage scheme.It is serviced once a year and touch wood no issues.

We do have to run off say one bowl of water to the kitchen sink as this is the longest run,but downstairs toilet and bathroom are no problem.

I am perplexed with KellNN comments saying electric showers are useless,again our triton has been faultless.

One issue though with condensing boilers is the  run of the pipe work for the condensate can be prone to freezing meaning the condensate cannot flow away.I have pipelagging and a tee piece to disconnect the condensate pipe where  it comes out of the wall.This did freeze on first installation until it was pipelagged.

Our new system has a condensing combi boiler with a climate compensation device.

The hot water temperature is limited at 60C which I find ok but the OH complains is a bit cool for bathing. The bathroom taps are furthest away from the boiler but once the cold water has run off the hot water is ok.

As I understand it the climate compensation thingy enables the boiler to run at maximum efficiency, saving, it's claimed, 15% on the gas bill. This is achieved by the system reacting more quickly to changes in temperature than the room thermostats.

Our latest gas bill for the period since the system was fitted was slightly higher than the same period last year but we won't have been using electricity to heat water in the cylinder. We used to keep the electricity on full time on the understanding that it was better to keep the cylinder hot than heat it up from cold every day. I'm anticipating a much reduced lecky bill🤞

There's an added bonus, the cylinder cupboard is now much more spacious.

With the very low water temperatures we get in winter, the flow (?) has to be turned down so much that the water has no scoosh.

Not a good shower experience IMO.

Our boiler heats the stored HW, did yours not?

We do have an immersion heater as well, but  never turn it on, it is only needed if the gas boiler fails.