I have no gass so am all electric and so my airing cupboard has just got the
traditional cylinder and immersion heater in it. It would be nice to be able
to dial up a temperature and fill a bath, and not have to wait for the
shower to stabilise its temperature, but is it worth the expense of
duplication for such wonders of science?
Brian

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"Dan S. MacAbre" wrote in message
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Chris Hogg wrote:
On Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:54:05 +0000, "Dan S. MacAbre"
wrote:

Now that the weather is warming up, I'm considering replacing our HW
storage tank (it's about 30 years old, and is getting a bit crusty
around some of the pipe connectors). Before I do, I suppose I ought to
ask if (in everyone's opinion) I should just replace it like-for-like?
Or is there some other direction I ought to be heading in, like
mains-pressure hot water, or just using instant hot-water taps
everywhere instead? Or something else?

We've just had a traditional sixty-year-old DHW system replaced by an
unvented, mains-pressure system in my late mother's bungalow, which we
intend to move into soon. Several comments:

It's based on a Joule tank, http://bit.ly/2Ht27Gz . The plumbing seems
a lot more complicated than before, with pressure regulators,
expansion vessels, pressure relief valves, tundishes etc all over the
place. The airing cupboard is now a cat's cradle of pipework. Whether
it could be simpler, I don't know. I think it all has to be installed
by a specialist, rather than DIY, BIMBW.

The DHW cylinder itself is much bigger that I expected; this may just
be what the plumber chose to install, rather than being necessary. My
comment to the plumber was that it looked like a section from a Saturn
5 rocket.

A potential disadvantage is that in very cold weather, such as we've
just had and where the mains supply may be off for several days, is
that you have no water at all. At least in our present place when the
water was cut off for 36 hours, we could draw down the water from the
tank in the loft, boiled where appropriate, but that wouldn't be an
option with an unvented system unless some way was found of retaining
the tank, in which case why bother with an unvented system at all.


Well, it's not like we have any problems with what there is now. We
occasionally need to switch on an immersion heater (our little boy has
several baths a day - he likes to play with his toy ships), and the
upstairs hot water pressure is a bit low (but I put a pump in, so it's
okay). It's just that sometimes, thinking of selling the house in the
future, everything might be a bit 'old-fashioned'. The thought of
mains-pressure HW does seem a little scary. And I don't really like
over-complicated things (which is why we still have the 30 year old
boiler).