In article ,
Lurch writes:
On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 14:11:34 -0000, "Paul"
strung together this:

Can I ask about heating for an extension to be built? I live in a modern
house with GCH. We're extending which I guess will increase the floor area
of the house by 25-30%. We've been chatting to someone who's done similar
about the heating. He has used modern storage heaters (Dimplex Duoheat) in
his extension. He feels these are fantastic but the main reason he did this
was that he was worried about extending his microbore central heating
system. He had heard that if you extend a microbore piped GCH system too
much, you can develop problems with balancing the system etc.

This is rubbish. The system will need rebalancing,
but that's part of fitting additional radiators anyway.
It might be necessary to use larger pipework for some
part of the new runs depending on heat load and distance,
but that wouldn't need wholesale replacement of any of
the existing microbore.

I like the look of these new storage heaters - but before I take the plunge,
any opinions on this as an option rather than extending the GCH system?

To be honest, any heating system can be over expanded. Your mate
obviously doesn't know too much about heating and rather than taking
advice on the subject decided to go for the far more inefficient and
not as controlable electric option.
Without knowing your system and how it is all piped up and what's in
at the minute I couldn't say what you can and can't do for what cost.
What I will say is that on most domestic extensions the limiting
factor is usually the boiler, the pipework is easily sorted to cope.
It may cost a little more to upgrade the boiler but after the initial
expense of this you'll recoup the cost in having a more economically
heated extension and depending on the age of your boiler it could also
be a great efficiency improvement in general.

If the boiler is a combi and house isn't enormous, chances are
it has plenty of spare heating capacity.

--
Andrew Gabriel