Vaillant or Alpha?

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Long story but in short we are completely revamping a dogs dinner of a house - originally built in the 50's as a bungalow and then planning told them it had to be a house. The result is bathroom downstairs (complete cylinder), water storage tanks in a cupboard at the top of the stairs and very little space in the roof void (mansard design).

We have now built an extension to put in a bathroom upstairs and replace the downstairs bathroom with a utility room into which we will put a new boiler -taking out a 20 year old Potterton in the kitchen.

We want to free up the large amount of space currently taken by the cylinder and cold water tanks and so are looking at combi boilers.

Water flow into the house is not particularly good (around 14).

Both the Vaillant and Alpha boilers blurb make claims about dealing with poor flow rates, but .............

I was looking at the storage type boiler as we have an enormous bath to fill and thought this may speed things up a bit, and the two boilers in my mind were the Vaillant 937 or the Alpha CD50. I did think about the Flowsmart from Alpha but wondered on balance whether the extra bells and whistles were worth the asking price.

Any advice/views will be very welcome
 
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I would advise against either of these boilers with your water flow at only 14 l/min.

You would need a minimum of 20l/min to get the benefit of these boilers hot water delivery capacity.

I think you may be getting confused by the literature about them working at low pressure.

This means actual low pressure, ie 0.5 - 1 Bar and not low flow rate.
 
You need a better water main or possibly an accumulator, if you want to get any value out of these boilers.

Otherwise you are looking at a boiler with a hot water flow rate of the Vaillant 831. If you connect a 937 to a 14 l/m main it will deliver a similar performance to the 831.

Rather than 'doing your research on the internet' which seems to lead most of our customers into confusion (and yourself, from the sound of it), why not invite a local installer round for advice and a costing?

I assume you will be using the services of such a person to fit the boiler anyway?
 
To defend myself - the three corgi people I have had in so far do not seem to want to commit themselves to making any kind of recommendations - in one case the advice i got was simply to give me a wholesale plumbing supply catalogue and tell me that Vaillant and Worcester were the best ranges, in another it was to give me a catalogue for the Alpha Flowsmart system, the third asked what i was looking for and I told him I wasnt sure as I didnt know what would work, his reply was to say to get him back when I know what it is I want. i have tried to ask the professionals but they havent been very helpful!

Having looked at this forum I was impressed with the knowledge shown here and decided to ask here before I went any further. Quite sensible I thought.

Any further thoughts will be very welcome
 
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I would recommend NOT using any of those you have had round so far :eek:

Simon is in Surrey, perhaps you could contact him/his company for a professional quote/job ;)
 

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