Heating up

When we moved to Valley Gate we inherited a very old gas boiler run from a 2000 litres LPG gas tank in the back garden.  The first day we moved in the boiler broke down and resulted in a call to Gas Technical Services   who's sticker we found inside the case.  Paul (Smith) arrived in a a matter of hours and got the boiler going commenting that it was probably on it's last legs. The next day the boiler went out because we had run out of gas!  Cue visit from Nigel from Calor to put 1,000 litres in the tank at a cost of £350.00.

When we finally moved in between Xmas and New Year 2009, within days we were snow bound with temperatures regularly plummeting below -5C and started burning gas like it was going out of fashion.  The 1000 litres of LPG ran out by the end of January and we had the tank filled completely.  Trying to keep the house warm with an inefficient boiler just ate the gas and the tank was down to 50% by the end of the winter.  We has spent over £600 in three months on gas keeping the house warm and cooking on the even older gas stove.  We had long-term plans for a more sustainable means of heating the house and generating hot water, however, it became clear that perhaps they needed to be rather shorter term....

We had been researching a system based on a large thermal store with inputs from solar panels and a wood burning stove and a gas boiler for backup.  I had been chatting with Paul about what we were planning to do when he was fixing the boiler and he mentioned a couple of several solar installations he had completed in Pembrokeshire.  We decided that we could not afford to wait for another Winter to change our heating system and so invited Paul to quote for a new system.

The first issue was where to locate the new boiler and thermal store.  Initially we looked at locating it in the guest room above the kitchen, however, the sloping ceiling meant that either we would have to reduce the size of the thermal store, or loose half of the bedroom.  In addition, a future connection to the wood burning stove in the sitting room would have to be pumped.

The project now started to get a life of its own. As the ideal location would be above the sitting room and we had ideas of creating a semi en-suite bathroom from the second rear bedroom, the two projects became one.

There are many thermal stores that cater for solar panels with a gas boiler backup, but finding one that would allow other heat source inputs (wood burning stove) required a bit of research.  Whilst Gas Technical Services are agents for Valliant,  Paul recommended a 280 litre Torrent RE made by Gledhill as the Valliant thermals stores can not accommodate additional heat inputs.

Initially, we only commissioned Paul to install the thermal store and a high efficiency ecoTECH Plus 428 condensing boiler and plumb in the new bathroom.  However, the sale of our house went through and so we included the Vallient solar panels and started to think about wood burning stoves with a back boiler.  We had been looking at the Stratford Eco Boiler SEB20 and by chance came across one on sale whilst sheltering from the torrential rain at the Pembrokeshire County Show.

The whole layout of the bathroom revolved around the space required for the thermal store and largest shower tray we could get away with.  In the end this was a very low profile Bette 1200 by 1000 enamelled steel tray around which a shower enclosure was built.


Work stated by laying a pipe superhighway across the house that included a feed for the future installation of underfloor heating downstairs.  The Thermal store was then plumbed into the gas boiler, underfloor heating circuit, solar panels and wood burning stove leaving only the control systems to be figured out.  This is where the fun started and in the end Paul took all the manuals away and made up a board back in his unit. 

After a few false starts the whole system was up an running.  One thing we noticed the first couple of nights after the system was commissioned was the boiler kept cutting in in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.  After a bit of investigation, we found that the 'frost protection' system required (bizarrely) only for the Spanish market had been left activated as soon as the temperature outside dropped below zero the boiler kicked in the keep the panels warm! We were therefore heating up the lower atmosphere at night for a week until I worked out what was going on.


Over the summer we have lots of free hot water and even on Xmas Day 2010 when the temperature outside was -12C, the solar panels got the water up to 42C

The wood burning stove works very well and looks amazing.  However, any idea I might have had about heating the house by chucking on the odd log now and then was quickly dispelled.  If you want hot water and   the radiators to work then you almost need a full time stoker!


The Calor tank was last filled in October 2010 and is now still 30% full with  most of the gas used when the frost setting kicked in.  We hope it will get us through the rest of the winter as it now would cost well over £1,000 to refill!