I’ve had my gas boiler replaced by an electric one as it was no longer possible to provide a flue meeting regs, actually in 2016 but this is my first time back at the property since then.
It’s been installed with the electric boiler doing the wet central heating and also feeding the coil in the cylinder (a Keston Spa unvented).
Tenants have been using it that way but the bills have been high and huge amounts of heat are lost to the boiler cupboard and adjoining rooms when only the hot water is on. I’ve fixed the immersion heater in the cylinder which hadn’t been used since the gas boiler went, and that seems like a much more efficient setup, surely? The cylinder is well insulated and little heat is lost in heating the tank. Obviously you’d traditionally think of the immersion as the expensive option but given it’s all electric anyway I think the opposite is the case.
But this leaves me with some questions…
1. What’s the ideal return temperature for the electric wet central heating? Can it be much lower than gas?
2. Can I safely close the valve to the indirect coil on the water cylinder, to disable the external boiler from heating it?
3. If I can’t do that, is it going to cause problems if the direct immersion temperature is different to the external boiler temperature? At the moment I have the external boiler set to 30 and the immersion set to 70.
Hope this makes some sort of sense.
Thanks
max
It’s been installed with the electric boiler doing the wet central heating and also feeding the coil in the cylinder (a Keston Spa unvented).
Tenants have been using it that way but the bills have been high and huge amounts of heat are lost to the boiler cupboard and adjoining rooms when only the hot water is on. I’ve fixed the immersion heater in the cylinder which hadn’t been used since the gas boiler went, and that seems like a much more efficient setup, surely? The cylinder is well insulated and little heat is lost in heating the tank. Obviously you’d traditionally think of the immersion as the expensive option but given it’s all electric anyway I think the opposite is the case.
But this leaves me with some questions…
1. What’s the ideal return temperature for the electric wet central heating? Can it be much lower than gas?
2. Can I safely close the valve to the indirect coil on the water cylinder, to disable the external boiler from heating it?
3. If I can’t do that, is it going to cause problems if the direct immersion temperature is different to the external boiler temperature? At the moment I have the external boiler set to 30 and the immersion set to 70.
Hope this makes some sort of sense.
Thanks
max
