Electric Boiler and Thermal Stores.

Helston_2

Could anybody help? Last year we had a new heating system fitted to our home to replace a combination of a small open fire, gas fire ran from a propane gas bottle outside and night storage heaters. We opted for a log burner (Charnwood SLX45) with back bolier that is connected to a Gledhill Torrent Thermal Store (about 260L) to heat the water and then once hot enough a pump switches on to supply the radiators (currently x4), with one more in the bathroom (expansion).

The system seemed to work well for the few weeks of cold weather we had before the summer kicked in. When winter came again it never worked as advertised. The problems we have encountered are that the log burner doesn't seem to be able to handle both the hot water and the radiators at the same time, even though it claims to handle upto 8 rads and DHW. Once on DHW heats up to 75+ degrees celcius which is ideal but when the pump kicks in we seem to just get a warm supply of heat to the radiators. If the pump is on permantly the same happens, hot water heats up ok, radaitors just warm. This is not ideal through the cold winter months. It is set up with two inlets and outlets from the log burner to the thermal store, so are not independent systems. However, we have noticed that there is an outlet from the store for CH but this has been blanked off and not used. We are currently using just logs but the burner is a multi fuel appliance.

We are not sure what the problem is and would like advice on a few things before we act again on the fitters of the sytem. The immersion which is permenantly on seems to get the water to 50 degrees celcius and that is it, however this is the third immersion we are on as two went unserviceable in the first few months (they heated the water to 70). Would anybody think that the hot water tank is just far too big for the system?

The thermal store has the ability to add other systems to it. We are tempted to add an electric boiler to keep the hot water at a better temperature than the immersion heater can handle. Hoping that this will then enable the burner to work a lot better on the heating of the home.

Any help or ideas really would be gratefully accepted. I hope this isn't too confusing a post but its hard to explain without somebody actually seeing the set up.

gas4you

Answered in your other post.

Pincher

If the top of the cylinder gets to 75 degrees C, then the thermal store is pretty hot, so the radiator circuit should be able to reach a decent temperature, like 50 degrees.

To prevent scalding, the outputs of the thermal store is supposed to have thermostatic mixing valves to keep the temperature safe. Maybe you have a stuck mixing valve?

Eco-Installer

It sounds like the connections are wrong. The bottom half of the cylinder is used for CH so it may be that this is not getting hot enough.

I would suggest checking all connections are installed as in the installation manual and check flow directions too!