House stripped of copper

In article , superdonkey wrote: [snip details]

I think Tiger gas in Padiham have a good reputation - brother uses them for work in his flats

John M

You might be rather unhappy with the performance of a combi. Only stored ho= t water gives a sensible bath fill rate. Electric showers are rather inferi= or performancewise to gas, and cost about 3x as much to run.

NT

Neither, IMHO.

MBQ

What is wrong with having to wait a few minutes for bath to fill?

Any maths on the electric shower is 3x more expensive than a "gas shower". Add in water meter costs to your calculations if using a pumped shower.

make that 20 or worse if someone else is running hot water.

You will have to say what your definition of "better" is...

Cheapest to install Fastest to install Cheapest to run Enough pressure to drill holes in you Enough flow to run a drencher showerhead Enough water for 4 teenagers to shower twice a day each with no gaps etc.

water gives a sensible bath fill rate. No it's bollocks that. If you have a tank you can fill the bath quick but then there no hot water left to top it up. If someone has just done the washing up you only get half a bath full which is dead annoying. Combis are great because you just put the tap of at not too fast a flow and go and get undressed and clean your teeth and the bath's full of piping hot water, and there's always more available. Far better. Tanks are so annoying; you're always running out of hot, and they waste leccy because they have to be hot all the time, even in summer when you're trying to cool the house not hot it up.

Bill

d hot water gives a sensible bath fill rate.

A nice warm airing cupboard is one of the things I most miss because we have a Combi.

That and a backup source of hot water (immersion heater).

Philip

I wish that I could find someone to install a new boiler at £1500, all in. In London. Any suggestions?

If the reheat time for a cylinder is much over 20 mins then there is something wrong with the system. By the time you have had your bath the tank is back to hot again.

Note the 20 mins to reheat the quantity of water in a cylinder is about the time it takes a combi to fill a bath... You can't get away from the laws of physics, the energy in the hot water can only come from the boiler and if it takes 20 min to heat 150l from 15 to 50C it will always take 20 mins. It just so happens with a cylinder you can get your 50C water delivered *much* faster.

Ie only once run out of tank hot water, when he wife and had a shower and gione ald wshed up and left the hit tap running

Just get a BIG eniough tank

Further, having a combi does not actually preclude a tank. With our precise situation, it might make sense to do that - if we replace the boiler.

Nothing. Having to wait 15 minutes though is unacceptable

Gas, after slight boiler inefficiency, works out at about 4p a kWh. Electrickery is triple that

Sure, but that part's the same for either method of heating the water

NT

A good solution, that's exactly what I have. With a header tank in the attic, the shower in the first floor and ground floor have decent pressure and there's no fight between water temperature and water pressure that I've experienced all too often with showers fed from a direct heating system.

JGH

Lots of oldish sytems still in service take triple that. Small heat exchanger in the HW cyl plus whatever crud accumulates on it.

NT

Because it is more than a few minutes and by the time the bath is full the water that entered it a few hours/days/years previously when you started filling it has gone stone cold. IMHO a bath needs a water feed that enables it to be filled to the brim with steaming hot water in less time than it takes for a s*it and a shave otherwise you may as well have a combi fed shower like a stinky foreigner.

water gives a sensible bath fill rate.

...a few months later with lukewarm water.

Never heard of a fast recovery cylinder? Mine will allow a shower to be run continuously, at rather better flow rates than an electric shower. And if you are continuously running out of stored hot water, the system has an inadequate sized cylinder.

This is simply not the case. I have a combi and I have to dilute the hot with cold or I burn my bollocks. And I like the bath very full so I can play 'up periscope'.

Bill