Central Heating

Right, that's it, I can't take the cold anymore. It's been below freezing here for the last 5 days and I'm not talking about the outside world, our house is fecking chuffing. Reason being, we don't have any central heating apart from Electric Storage Heaters which are pish when the real cold hits as they're so uncontrollable. Nope, it's time to bite the bullet and pony up a wad of cash to invest in a modern central heating system.

That decision is the easy part over and done with, come next autumn we'll be basking in our pants in front of shiny new radiators pumping out a glorious warm glow. Plumbers though, oh dear, plumbers, not looking forward to all that teeth sucking, shaking of the head, stroking the chin before the presentation of a quotation which would break most small countries' national budget.

Read more...


Before I jump into the jaws of doom and actually speak to a plumber (if I can get hold of one) I want to clue myself up on what we actually require.

First decision is gas or oil fired. There's gas in our street but strangely not to our house so Transco have quoted a figure of £519 (standard charge) to connect us to the gas main. Oil however seems quite popular in the area as well but the cost of a decent sized oil tank isn't far off what Transco are charging for a gas supply and you've got the installation cost of the tank along with the visual downside. Currently, for simplicity's sake we're leaning towards gas.

I've more or less decided that the boiler will be placed in either the shower room (to be ripped out and converted into a utility room in the future) or the cupboard in the bathroom. Access to the outside is good from both rooms for ventilation and gas or oil input. But what type of boiler? There's only 2 of us in the house so large amounts of hot water is not really a concern. This would lead me to look at a Combi boiler or maybe a condensing-combi boiler. Need to research it a bit more for advantages/disadvantages, costs, maintenance etc.

We will need 10 radiators to cover all the rooms and I'll do a first pass of sizing and placing them before speaking to an "expert". I think I used to have a spreadsheet (from Uni) for calculating the heatloss of a room to help in sizing radiators and ultimately the boiler to feed them. Maybe have a search on the net for something similar.

So, the journey to warmth and poverty starts here, as usual I'll give update posts as it progresses.

Category:

• Personal
• Home
• Heating