Parkray Solid Fuel Boiler

TBagpuss

Hi, I'm currently looking to move house, and one of the properties I'm looking at is a former council house (lovely big garden and decent sized rooms ;-) )
the details say "Centrally heated via a traditional Parkray solid fuel fire with boiler situated in the sitting room."

Does anyone have experience of how practical this is in terms of heating a house and water? Do you have to keep a fire lit during the summer? I work full time so am out most of the day, and wonder about warming the house up quickly on returning home...

I will need to ask when I view the property but I suspect that there is no mains gas to the village so I assume the alternative would be to replace it with an oil fired system with timers.

Are other any other issues I ought to be considering if I decided to buy the property?

Any comments gratefully received :-)

highrisklowreturn

You will not get a better central heating system than this.


I had one installed after Easter, after the big snow fall. It replaced both a multi fuel stove and an oil CH system, using the circulation pump from the oil system. It gives out a good heat into the room, but the real joy is in it running the radiators.

When I had oil, I had cold spots all over the system, and lukewarm parts in every radiator, none of which exist not. It also literally boils the water, and the bath water produced seems to see a lot cleaner than that I got with oil.

Coal is significantly cheaper than oil. The trick is to buy from a wholesaler - which isn't hard as their company name generally appears on the retailers bags, and buy by the tonne ie 40 bags. 2 tonne would comfortably do a house all autumn, winter, and spring.

What are the drawbacks?

1. It looks ugly - if it's a consort 88 like mine it is just a sitting timewarp of the 80s.
2. It can take 2-3 hours to get a living room warmed up in Winter, and maybe another hour before you're reading to throw the back boiler into circulation.
3. Clearing the fire out and sweeping - but doing these yourself, and the general ease of repair, compensate in not having to pay a gas or oil boiler technician for a service.
4. Storage of fuel - space is not the issue. People assume large amounts of coal are hard to store - they aren't. Just get a pallet and you can easily hold 60 bags ie 1.5 tonne. The problem is the bags get wet and whilst this doesn't affect the coal's energy value it means it can run everywhere such as on the carpets.
5. You need to have another form of water heating for summer to avoid wasting coal. Either an electric shower or an immersion are best - I have an immersion and it's best in summer as it struggles against the winter cold.

I wouldn't change this heating system for the world - it's very cheap if you source your fuel correctly, easy to run, easy to repair, is a workhorse, can get a house very warm, gives a nice flame to come home to (tho not as good as an open fire), provides a centre to the home. The fires themselves have also stood the test of time - mine is from 1986 - almost 30 years old - and still going strong. Ask what the life expectancy of a modern oil or gas boiler is with all the efficiency gadgets thrown in and electronics is, what the repair and servicing costs are - or keep with bob basic and laugh at the rest of the country as their utility bills soar.

malc_b

AFAIR the parkray was similar to the coal fired system I used to have but I'm not sure if it has a hopper. In mine the coal (anthracite beans) went in the top and fed down to the fire so if you were going out to work you might get a away with topping it up once a day. Not sure about Parkray. Dirt is an issue. Chucking coal into a fire and removing ashes (even into a covered tin designed to cut down on the dust) creates a lot of mess. Fine black dust that settles and means you need to clean more regularly than for other forms of heating.

In summer you'd let the fire go out and use electric water heating. There is a minimum amount of coal you need to burn in a day to keep the fire lit (like tick over in car). In summer the fire will just go out or you get very hot.

Control is not very good. Typically you need to give the fire a poke to get it going so forget waking up to a warm house. The only good point is that you'll have a dump radiator in the bathroom that is always on keeping that warm and the towels warm and dry. I do miss that feature.

Also, the fire will go out in a day so every holiday or weekend break will mean relighting it and coming back to a cold house. Walking in and just turning on the heat it ain't. I'm surprised that the above poster kept the sacks. My coal man took the sacks away to reuse them. Coal is delivered to then in a big truck and just dumped in a pile. The coal man puts it in sack just for delivery. They'd need a huge number of sacks if they left them with everyone.

I changed to oil in 2004. I don't miss having to light the fire all the time and the dirt/duct. If gas is available then a gas fire with back boiler would be your best option. I guess you could do that with LPG too but much more expensive. Fuel costs are here http://www.nottenergy.com/energy_cost_comparison/ but you need to take this just a rough guide as some of their figures are a bit questionable (e.g. for oil they use nett calorific value where as the efficiency figures use gross, and the oil price is today's price where as typically you try to fill up in summer when it is cheaper).

In case it is useful, I moved from a lounge based back boiler to a kitchen boiler. I did this by taking out the lounge fire and bridging between the gravity feed pipes and the CH pipes. This mean I could then connect to CH via the gravity feed pipes in the airing cupboard which was above the kitchen. I removed a section of kitchen ceiling to pipe from there to the new boiler.

TBagpuss

Thank you both.
I suspect that gas isn't an option - the property is in a village and I don't think has mains gas, so I think if I bought the house and didn't want to keep the solid fuel system oil would probably be the only alternative.

Storgage of coal wouldn't be a big issue - one of the big selling points for the house is that is has a BIG garden.

I think the issue for me is that I wrl full time, so if you can't keep the fire in during the day it sounds as though I could end up with it only ever getting properly warm just as I was leaving for work, or going to bed, which is not ideal :-)

Highrisklowreturn - what sort of cost was it for you to convert? (I wonder whether converting the other way, from solid fuel to oil would be similar? If it is not prohibitively expensive I could look at a budget to try it for the first winter and then convert to oil if it didn't work for me..

So many choices to make.

highrisklowreturn

There was no conversion cost as such. I had oil up to 4 months ago. Two years ago I bought a multi fuel stove (trendy modern term for glass fronted fire) to heat the living room as the oil didn't heat the house well, and often required back up with electric space heaters.

The stove cost £370 and around £250 for install. At the time I was still paying £7-9 per bag of coal depending on type when buying from a RETAILER.

In April a fellow across the street was chucking out the parkray after tearing it out of the wall. I asked him if he wanted it as I know it had a backboiler for radiators and hot water. He gave me it. It cost me £200 in parts off a plumber's merchant and £120 for plumbing tools on a list given to me by a local plumber who charged £80 to rig it up. So £400 for spare parts, labour, piping and fittings, and the stove was free. If you were in NI I actually got a spare one and would give it away.

Coal costs from retailer are at £200 a tonne for bituminous coal and around £225 for a decent blend of someless. It's ludicrously cheap.

Also don't think as others might say it takes forever to heat up - it doesn't. I have a large terrace house where the two downstairs rooms are knocked into one. If it were just one room, it would be hot in 30 minutes, but takes about 2 hours to get going (ie for the whole room to be comfortably warm - nothing is stopping you sitting in front of fire with a book once lit and waiting for it to heat before moving on).

If you buy the best smokeless coal, about £7 a bag from wholesaler, the coals can stay lit up to 36 hours from which the fire can be rekindled.

Rolandtheroadie

We're on oil just now but I'm still seriously considering adding a multifuel burner that can run the radiators.

Why not look into adding an oil system to the solid fuel system already there? That way, you'll have the best of both worlds (handy for when you realise how much oil costs and how much cheaper the fire would have been)

[Deleted User]

Even cheaper if you chuck on some sea coal. I bought 5 x 25kg bags off a guy on Gumtree for £2 each. Set the fire away with usual coke then top up with the sea coal during the evening. Practically free heat. Nice!

muckybutt

There's a reason why sea coal is cheap - it's c**p !

[Deleted User]

muckybutt wrote: »

There's a reason why sea coal is cheap - it's c**p !

Yeah hence having to set fire away with normal coke as the sea coal won't light.