On Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:27:26 +0000, Stephen wrote:

I thought that some old posts here had said you needed to run them with
the windows open to provide the necessary ventilation to prevent
condensation and incomplete combustion,

Depends on how air tight your house is (tents/caravans I suspect are
not very airtight). A modern, heavyly insulated, double glazed, box
without a chimney and a room sealed boiler may benefit from having
all the trickle vents opened. But older properties, assuming they
don't suffer condensation normally, it's probably not a issue.

I was wondering about getting a gas fire for power cuts and I suppose
that's what started me reading up about this. However, I don't know if
we have power cuts often enough to justify this. But I thought that
the preferred method in this group was to hook the boiler up to a
generator or inverter?

We have a gen set as well. B-) Our power is pretty good but if it
does go off for more than a second or two it may well be off for 6
hours or longer. We are also on our own 11kV spur and our own
transformer. Some of the poles that support the line are at
"interesting" angles. If one of those, or the line, took a fall
during a storm I suspect we would be at the bottom of the list to get
repaired and back on grid being just a single customer.

The gen set is mainly to keep the freezers and fridges running though
the power to the CH/HW system does go through a 13A plug (3A fuse) so
it can be powered from the generator if required.

I'm still puzzled why these use butane and everything else used
propane though. Particularly if butane doesn't work at temperatures
around freezing, which is when you are most likely to need to use the
heater?

You must be rather hardier than us if you can live in a house
approaching freezing... The bedrooms can get down to 12C during a
windy night middle of winter and that is cool enough thank you. Our
normal living room temp of 18C is more than warm enough to vaporise
butane fast enough to drive a fire.

--
Cheers
Dave.