On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:46:30 +0100, John Rumm wrote:

Ed Sirett wrote:

I'm interested to hear from anyone who has a condensing combi.
I want to know what your experience of it is.

I fitted a Ideal Isar HE35 in March this year. It has performed very
well since then. Boiler is physically very small and neat (hence the
reason for choosing it - it had to fit a pre existing gap left by a
Gloworm Fuelsaver 55F).

Operation is very quiet (better that the one it replaced). Heating
performance seemed fine using a programmable thermostat. It seems to
modulate to match the actual load very well. Seems to run in condensing
mode 90%+ of the time (judging by the pluming) when running the heating.
This may improve later since I have not balanced the radiators yet,
since I knew I would be adding more radiators to it in the near future
anyway.

Not had chance to asses the impact on fuel usage since the time is too
short, and for a good proportion of the first couple of months there
were various holes in the house as I was getting stuck into the
structural bits of a loft conversion. These I presume would not make for
a fair like for like comparison!

Instalation was pretty straight forward, no setting up procedures to
perform as such. Pipework all runs to a mounting tray which the boiler
is lifted onto afterwards (that was the hardest bit!). Standard
concentric flue turret at the top.

DHW performance is OK. It does not attempt to modulate the flow of
water, so if the incoming water is cold enough and the supply is up to
it, then demanding water too fast will result in the temperature
falling. In the winter with ground water at 5 degrees you could open a
bath tap to approx 70% max flow before reducing the temperature to below
bath temp. In the summer our mains feed (about 22 lpm) is not up to
dropping it below bath temp. The thermostat works well at setting a
maximum temperature for the water. It runs a heat exchanger preheat
every few hours to ensure that there is always hot water available
"instantly".

Anything else you want to know?

Ta. Price.

--
Ed Sirett - Property maintainer and registered gas fitter.
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