When I was doing mine, I had a spare rad free (having moved a few around and upsized three others), so I stuck a medium sized single panel rad I had left over into the utility room where the boiler is with a TRV on it. It actually does a better job of regulating the room temperature than the previous cast iron boiler did.
Why would the supply need upgrading? Are you fitting a bigger boiler because the old one is too small?
replacing just the boiler should mean less gas is needed and no upgrade would be required.
If you decide to fit a combi, rather than a system, boiler you may need a bigger pipe but 22 mm copper pipe is cheap.
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I bet most of them were.
the standard 21.5 mm pipe is too small for any exterior run. even 32 mm is pushing it if the weather is cold for a long time.
Some boilers don't even have a siphon to dump batches of condensate so they freeze up more easily.
Because we had a few mild winters a lot of people thought it was OK to just run the drain external without insulation, etc.
OK. Thanks for the clarification.
That's the other thing I don't like about modern boilers - all the gubbins are all naked and untidy. I've had to try and build fiddly framework to box everything in, but can't manage to make it tidy. My old "iron box" boiler was a neat box with no untidy (or unsafe?) exposed parts.
JGH
Doesn't have to be...
Does your boiler really have "Java inside".
(Knowing you, I suspect the answer is "yes".)
Yep, utter con by the installers & BG in demanding payments to fit trace he ating and insulation to drains. It was predictable and avoidable. Water has frozen at 0 degC for a very long time, every mechanical specification I've ever seen required either trace heating and insulation OR insulation and a nti-freeze for external exposed water pipes.
They only got away with (it in most cases) because they were dealing with clueless householders.
It wasn't the winter of 2011 that was unusually severe, it was the preced ing 10 years' winters that were unusually mild and that was when most of th e condensers were installed.
heating and insulation to drains. It was predictable and avoidable. Water h as frozen at 0 degC for a very long time, every mechanical specification I' ve ever seen required either trace heating and insulation OR insulation and anti-freeze for external exposed water pipes.
ith clueless householders.
eceding 10 years' winters that were unusually mild and that was when most o f the condensers were installed.
Both of mine have been designed to run into the sink waste indoors, one via a 'T' into the top of a washing machine stack, the other via a tundish into the sink waste outlet pipe. Neither will freeze, required a bit more thought with the routing though, but 22mm solvent weld is cheap!
Yes, avoid combis like a plague, too many components shoe-horned into the s tandard boiler casing, plus a plate heat exchanger, which WILL scale up in hard water areas, but which virtually no installers fit scale-prevention de vices.
Combis have their place, mostly in shoe-box flats.
The other problem, with modern boilers is that the heat exchangers have n arrow waterways and they are much less tolerant of mucky water than the cas t iron lumps they repleced. This ends in tears on old systems that have acc umulated decades of sludge from corrosion and leaks, that the F&E tank has disguised.
Apart from the few moving parts that wear out, modern electronic controls should be more reliable. Apart from dodgy electrolytic capacitors, there i sn't much that should fail. I'd suspect most PCBs that are replaced have be en renewed speculatively (We don't know what's wrong, so we'll stick in a n ew PCB and charge you for it) or have failed due to leaks.
Raden's views would be interesting.
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Actually, no!
It's a post-it note I happened to have to hand, which I used to record the flow temperature for each position of the (unmarked) temperature knob.
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