replace boiler or keep existing ?

[musher]

Hi all, first post on here and looking for some advice.

I'm decorating my house this year and intend to modernise the kitchen with new units, floor etc. The boiler is situated in the kitchen and is a vokera 20-80 R.S Flowmatic. It was installed around 1992 and has been very good with very few problems; we've always had it serviced every 2 years and it works very well with no sign of faltering.

My question is (and i'm sure i know the answer) would you replace this boiler for a new model ? If the answer is as i suspect then which model would give me similar or better performance ? I've trawled through various websites looking at different models: vaillant; baxi and biasi to name three but have no idea what is good/bad!

How much more efficient are new boilers compared to my existing ? I don't just mean from an enviromental perspective but also in terms of flow rate, speed of warming up water.

I have little knowledge of how boilers work so am wondering how easy it would be for someone to remove the existing boiler and reposition the new one (current one is on the back wall, i want the new one just moved to the right so it's on the side wall) and move pipework around etc........it looks as complicated as heart surgery to me!

Cheers for any answers.

 

[StephenW]

Work out what advantages you will get from a new boiler. If it's just lower fuel bills then work out the payback time. So if it costs say £1500 to switch boiler and you save £100 per year then that's a long payback time. And new boilers appear to not last as long as older ones.
I want to replace my floor standing boiler in the kitchen with a wall mounted one in the garage. For me, the reason is to create some space in the kitchen and more importantly so that I don't have to have large permanently open vents to the outside making the kitchen very cold in winter. So for me there are other advantages than just lower bills.

 

[Agile]

Your boiler is old but they are solidly built and work well. Its 24 kW.

A modern boiler will be about 12% more efficient and could be a higher power as 28 kW or 30 kW are usually fitted now.

They will probably start the hot water a bit sooner as the components are of lighter construction but the overall performance is about the same plus more power if something over 24 kW was fitted.

A Viessmann boiler is a good addition to the makes you mentioned and when fitted by an approved installer they have a five year warrantee.

Boilers cost about £500-£1000 and fitting in a nearby but different position would usually be under £1000.

Steven's comments are a red herring in your case because you want to move the boiler. There is no point in paying to have such an old boiler moved because its still old when its been moved.

There is never any financial payback in fitting a new boiler just to achieve lower fuel costs unless the annual gas bill is over £1500.

Tony

 

[Ronald0]

There are several problems with older boilers.

They are easy to fix, most parts are readily available and they last too long.

Keep the one you've got for as long as you can; better for you, better for the environment.

 

[musher]

cheers for the advice.