On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 11:12:48 +0100, "Christian McArdle"
wrote:

Any comments/ideas/suggestions?

Thanks for your input.

It sounds like a big house.

-ish ... typical barn conversion w/ two-storey hallway, large sitting
room, kitchen, dining room, utility room (these two in a one-storey
extension), 4 double bedrooms, 2 bathrooms.

I think a combi might be underspecified,
particularly if you expect to use several bathrooms at once.

Probably not an issue, since we have "work of the devil" (TM) electric
showers (bath tends to be used about once a week!), and use cold-fill
dish- and clothes-washing machines.

Higher output
combis tend to be quite large.

Indeed -- this was one of the drivers behind the thought of taking
advantage of the available space in the utility room (which has
accessible mains water and gas supplies) and put in two small(ish)
combis rather than one big one.

You might consider keeping the storage
system, but putting a compact modern condensing system boiler in the
kitchen. Alternativley, get a compact combi and use its hot water system for
the kitchen tap only, keeping the storage system for bathrooms.

With the two-combi's solution we'd thought of using a smaller one in
the kitchen to provide h/w to the kitchen and to the downstairs
bathroom (which is right next to the kitchen) and to heat about 2/3 of
the downstairs rads, with the 2nd (larger) combi providing h/w in the
utility room (which currently only has cold water), the upstairs
bathroom, and the remaining C/H zones (upstairs rads plus those in the
ground floor extension). This second combi would (hopefully) have
some spare capacity should we ever get round to our "dream project" of
putting a second floor on the existing extension (w/ additional rads
and an en-suite bathroom to a new master bedroom).

Also, you should probably consider changing to oil. I understand it is
cheaper than LPG.

We did some calculations on this and found out that it would be a
*little* cheaper, but not enough to really consider this as an
alternative given that we would be retaining the LPG for cooking -
taking into account the infrastructure costs necessary to install an
oil tank and piping.

Julian


--
Julian Fowler
julian (at) bellevue-barn (dot) org (dot) uk