Boiler Recommendations

[presta]

Installers/specifiers tend to steer you towards a particular manufacturer because they get "points" every time they buy their boilers. The "points" can be traded for holidays, shopping vouchers etc.

This is off at a bit of a tangent, but...

Back in the '80s I used to swim with a guy who was a motorbike salesman. At one time Honda had a scheme where salesmen earned points for each bike they sold, and the winner with the most points at the end of the year got a holiday for two in Japan. The points were allocated to bikes according to how badly Honda wanted to get rid of them, and there were just two 10-point bikes: the Gold Wing and a trials bike that nobody bought because it was widely recognised as being a bit of a lemon.

Anyhow, one day a wallet on legs walked in the showroom and told the guy that he was in the market for 20-30 trials bikes for a training school he was setting up. He'd done his homework well, and and wanted to know what deals he could get on a Suzuki.

Guess who won the holiday in Japan.....

 

[JtB]

We've had a Viessmann boiler for a few years now, seems very good. Plumber fitted it at cost, so very reasonable price to us.

We also have a Viessmann boiler which is a very big brand in Europe. We’ve had it for several years and are very happy with it. The reason we chose this brand is because its stainless steel heat exchanger makes it more suited to water softeners. If we’d gone with one of the popular UK brands then we’d have had to run a hard water supply from the kitchen to the loft.

 

[Tenkaykev]

Thread refresh!
Our Glowworm boiler is still going strong after 20+years🤞 it's a conventional boiler with HW cylinder and a large water tank in the loft.
A recent refurb saw the downstairs toilet converted to a shower room which brought to the fore the low water pressure from our gravity fed system. We thought the extra head of water from the loft to the ground floor would provide a big boost but that turned out to be not the case. A plumber friend took a look and said the problem was it's fed with a 15mm pipe that follows a convoluted path with several 90 degree bends as it travels from the loft.
We discussed pumps, he said a pump would certainly help with the upstairs shower but because of the way our system is laid out it's not going to help much with the downstairs. Another option would be to install an unvented system which would be spendy and require some work to fit a pressure relief system that's required for safety purposes.
He said that a Combi boiler was another option, as the water would be at mains pressure. We live in a very hard water area and was wondering if any forum members had any experience with the combination of Combi boilers and hard water ?

 

[gbb]

Thread refresh!
Our Glowworm boiler is still going strong after 20+years🤞 it's a conventional boiler with HW cylinder and a large water tank in the loft.
A recent refurb saw the downstairs toilet converted to a shower room which brought to the fore the low water pressure from our gravity fed system. We thought the extra head of water from the loft to the ground floor would provide a big boost but that turned out to be not the case. A plumber friend took a look and said the problem was it's fed with a 15mm pipe that follows a convoluted path with several 90 degree bends as it travels from the loft.
We discussed pumps, he said a pump would certainly help with the upstairs shower but because of the way our system is laid out it's not going to help much with the downstairs. Another option would be to install an unvented system which would be spendy and require some work to fit a pressure relief system that's required for safety purposes.
He said that a Combi boiler was another option, as the water would be at mains pressure. We live in a very hard water area and was wondering if any forum members had any experience with the combination of Combi boilers and hard water ?

Our former boiler was a Glow Worm I think, it too was way over 20 years old and had been very reliable with just one actually boiler repair, the remainder being system repairs (pumps etc) we only replaced ours because it was time to before it failed properly.

 

[presta]

We live in a very hard water area and was wondering if any forum members had any experience with the combination of Combi boilers and hard water ?

It's pretty hard water here in Essex, and my Worcester Bosch combi has survived OK since June 2017. That said, I have no way of knowing it won't keel over tomorrow of course. (It's a 28 CDi Compact, but I don't think they still make that model)