Hopefully, we'll be completing on a house in the next couple of months which I'm expecting will have an eye-watering gas bill.
It's old (1600's), listed, and fairly big (8 beds and generally large rooms. lots of windows. Secondary but not double-glazed.)
I've not had a chance to look into the central heating in detail as we've only had 2 viewings, but there's definitely a *lot* of it. Almost all the rooms have multiple rads and just about all the wall space in some rooms has rads on it (e.g. 6 in the conservatory alone!?). There must be about 45 rads in total. There's 4 big gas boilers dotted around (look like combi's) and each is 1.5-2x the size of our boiler at home. Not sure how many KW but I suspect quite a lot. I'm not sure how it's zoned and I didn't really spot any obvious room stats.
We'll have quite a large refurb to do, and I want to take the opportunity to try and improve the efficiency/control of the heating. I'm not really suggesting I'll DIY this, but I'd like to understand what a good solution might look like in this situation (theory vs. reality!)...
As there's a lot of house to heat, I think zoning will be quite important. I like my gadgets so I'd quite like a system that can be controlled from phone/ipad (Heatmiser neo seems to scale better than most?)
Assuming that we start again from scratch, I'm thinking something like:
- Get rid of the 4 separate combi's/systems
- New big (commercial?) central system boiler (or 2 paralleled if necessary/better?)
- Unvented tank for hot water
- 28mm from boiler(s)
- Feed an 'upstairs' manifold in 22mm (located upstairs)
- Feed a 'downstairs' manifold in 22mm (located downstairs)
- 1 decent pump
- Mostly rads but switch to wet underfloor where possible (can I mix rads and underfloor on the same manifold?)
- Heatmiser neo stat in every room
- Heatmiser wiring centres
- Electric actuators on each manifold port
- Manifold port per room
- Rads in each room piped in parallel 15mm from manifolds
Is this a sensible way to approach it? Seems to make sense to me in theory (in my very un-trained head), but is real-life likely to be a different story? Is there a better way to do this?
Any thoughts?
It's old (1600's), listed, and fairly big (8 beds and generally large rooms. lots of windows. Secondary but not double-glazed.)
I've not had a chance to look into the central heating in detail as we've only had 2 viewings, but there's definitely a *lot* of it. Almost all the rooms have multiple rads and just about all the wall space in some rooms has rads on it (e.g. 6 in the conservatory alone!?). There must be about 45 rads in total. There's 4 big gas boilers dotted around (look like combi's) and each is 1.5-2x the size of our boiler at home. Not sure how many KW but I suspect quite a lot. I'm not sure how it's zoned and I didn't really spot any obvious room stats.
We'll have quite a large refurb to do, and I want to take the opportunity to try and improve the efficiency/control of the heating. I'm not really suggesting I'll DIY this, but I'd like to understand what a good solution might look like in this situation (theory vs. reality!)...
As there's a lot of house to heat, I think zoning will be quite important. I like my gadgets so I'd quite like a system that can be controlled from phone/ipad (Heatmiser neo seems to scale better than most?)
Assuming that we start again from scratch, I'm thinking something like:
- Get rid of the 4 separate combi's/systems
- New big (commercial?) central system boiler (or 2 paralleled if necessary/better?)
- Unvented tank for hot water
- 28mm from boiler(s)
- Feed an 'upstairs' manifold in 22mm (located upstairs)
- Feed a 'downstairs' manifold in 22mm (located downstairs)
- 1 decent pump
- Mostly rads but switch to wet underfloor where possible (can I mix rads and underfloor on the same manifold?)
- Heatmiser neo stat in every room
- Heatmiser wiring centres
- Electric actuators on each manifold port
- Manifold port per room
- Rads in each room piped in parallel 15mm from manifolds
Is this a sensible way to approach it? Seems to make sense to me in theory (in my very un-trained head), but is real-life likely to be a different story? Is there a better way to do this?
Any thoughts?
