One job leads to another

There's plenty on this group. Try looking back at past threads on this subject.

I was in much the same position as you. I now have a DPS Pandora heat bank with Worcester-Bosch Greenstar HE28 System boiler and am very happy with both. I converted to S-Plan-Plus at the same time and moved absolutely every component except the radiators and much of the existing pipework.

The zone valves moved from the airing cupboard to be spread around the house (one in loft, two in understairs cupboard, one under kitchen units). The boiler moved from the kitchen to the loft. The HWC moved from the airing cupboard into the loft, changing to a heat bank in the process. The programmer moved from the kitchen to the understairs cupboard and the room thermostat became programmable and started having babies.

What you wish to do with your system would depend on what you have now, what you want to end up with, how much you want to do yourself and the depth of your pockets. We'll need more information to advise further.

Christian.

Someone recommended this site recently containing boiler efficiency information:

of products for consideration and even to see how long something has been on the market.

However, from the perspective of selecting based on efficiency, there are some limitations.

The first is the statistical analysis of the data and measurement uncertainty. SEDBUK say that to be able to say that one boiler is more efficient than another with 95% confidence, the figures need to be at least 3% apart. When values are closer together then the differences are less and less reliable and it is not meaningful to select one boiler over another on efficiency grounds if there is a small difference.

There are two aspects of current products which result in close grouping of numbers.

At the very bottom end, minimum efficiency figures from the Approved Documents to the Building Regulations (part L1) set a value of 78%. Manufacturers who had products close to that figure when the rules changed did various tweaks such as changing permanent pilots for electronic ignition in order to keep products that were really past their sell-by date on the market. Hence there are a bunch of products in the 78-80% range.

Condensing boilers of recent design all group in the 90-91% range. Because the differences are again so small, it is not meaningful to say that a 91% boiler is likely to be more efficient than a 90.5% one.

So the site does have useful data, but can be misleading if one doesn't appreciate the statistical meaning of the numbers.

.andy

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