Superseal Magic Box -

EricMears

bjproc wrote: »

no, no typo, my parents have a £500+ annual energy bill and this guy said they could save over £800 :eek:

PS, i think i may get a solicitors letter, as i called their company something
the boss was on the phone to my saying legal action.......

I'd make an alternative suggestion :-

Save yourselves the cost of the equipment and installation; leave everything as it is and just send me a cheque for £800 a year.

Since you'll have a huge saving in costs, you don't need to charge £8,500 (or indeed anything at all).

Shaun1986

Hi Guys,

I see alot of people having concearns regarding the "MAGIC HEATING BOX"

I would like to give people my views as most of the views posted are from heating engineers, plumbers ect who in actual fact stand to benifit from boiler breakdowns and replacements as a way of living rather that giving impartial feedback.

A lot of what is said is correct about the BOX its self and about the other components supplyed with it.

The BOX acts as a Heat exchanger/buffer tank. the reason for this is, currently on small domestic boilers there is a flow pump attched which is designed specifically for the boiler so.... to increase this size and flow rate would actually stop the boiler effectivly heating the water.

so by allowing the box to store this water and directly exchange heat to the flowing central heating system and attaching a bigger pump to this loop is more effective.

Now lets have a look at what you get for your money....

£8,500 purchase price.
£900 - £1200 system flush & new TRV's(contact British gas for comparison)
New control system, thermistat ect. (anywere bewteen £1000 - £3000) to buy and install from a company.
The box, plumbing and installation cost, fuel ect.

Now here is the most importnant part potential saving.

There is no way to establish a full savings without a survey of how the system is proforming at present, however using figures from DECC shows that;

If you turn your boiler down 1 degrees it can save you 2/3% on your heating bill annually.

so if the boiler is running at a standard temprature of 75 degrees for a boiler of couple of years old in a 3 bedroom house and you turn it down to 60 degrees it will not satisfy your required room stat temp which im sure you agree?

so if this can be done but a more efficient way to heat the radiators and pumped 70% faster then it WILL produce the required temp in the room.

so lets do the maths...... 15 degrees equals 30-40% savings just on the temprature being altered not including the system flush, the new temp controller and allowing your boiler to turn off and on by itself when the room is warm enough rather than trying to heat other rooms which radiator are full of air and sludge ect and to top it off it extracts air which reduces corrossion.

Now is the price justifyable if you have a spend of around £1300 for your gas/oil/lpg annually?? absolutely. BOILER COMPANIES ARE EVEN OFFERING A HIGHER WARRANTY PERIOD IF YOU HAVE ONE OF THE BOXES INSTALLED. WHY????

these are my findings and hope they help anyone concidering the purchase.

IF YOU ARE SPENDING LESS THAN £1300 annually on heating then its very hard to justify the outlay. I would suggest stay clear.

IF YOU ARE SPENDING MORE THAT £1300 annually on heating then you can justify a payback period of around 9-12 years as a min without taking into concideration the cost increase in fuel.

Shaun1986

Trapper wrote: »

This is about £ 300-400 of kit being installed at a cost to the end user of over £ 10,000.

Savings might, just, amount to 5% on an older boiler, but you'd be better replacing anything over 10 years of age with a new condesing boiler at a third of the cost or less - and then see real savings of perhaps 25%!

Can i ask were you have materialized these figures??

So are you calling DECC(Department of Energy and CLimate Change) liars?

SHaun

Shaun1986

Trapper wrote: »

This is about £ 300-400 of kit being installed at a cost to the end user of over £ 10,000.

Savings might, just, amount to 5% on an older boiler, but you'd be better replacing anything over 10 years of age with a new condesing boiler at a third of the cost or less - and then see real savings of perhaps 25%!

Would you happen to be a Heating engineer or Plumber of some sort?

Martyn1981

Shaun1986 wrote: »

Hi Guys,

£900 - £1200 system flush & new TRV's(contact British gas for comparison)
New control system, thermistat ect. (anywere bewteen £1000 - £3000) to buy and install from a company.

Thanks for the info, but .....

Last year I had new TRV's (10) and the system flushed. Ok, I flushed it myself, so total cost was about £15 for cleaner and inhibitor. And I paid the plumber £100 for changing the TRV's which I got for approx £100, so £215 all in. Obviously would have been slightly higher if he'd had to spend an hour flushing the system, and popped round briefly the week before to add the cleaner - but he didn't.

£1k to £3k for a new control system ...... as opposed to £3k for a complete new GCH system!

Shaun1986 wrote: »

Hi Guys,

There is no way to establish a full savings without a survey of how the system is proforming at present, however using figures from DECC shows that;

If you turn your boiler down 1 degrees it can save you 2/3% on your heating bill annually.

so if the boiler is running at a standard temprature of 75 degrees for a boiler of couple of years old in a 3 bedroom house and you turn it down to 60 degrees it will not satisfy your required room stat temp which im sure you agree?

so if this can be done but a more efficient way to heat the radiators and pumped 70% faster then it WILL produce the required temp in the room.

so lets do the maths...... 15 degrees equals 30-40% savings just on the temprature being altered

Am I going crazy, or is this a maths trick. The 2 to 3% per degree saving is on the temp of the house, not the temperature of the water in the GCH system?

Mart.

Martyn1981

Shaun1986 wrote: »

Hi Guys,

If you turn your boiler down 1 degrees it can save you 2/3% on your heating bill annually.

so if the boiler is running at a standard temprature of 75 degrees for a boiler of couple of years old in a 3 bedroom house and you turn it down to 60 degrees it will not satisfy your required room stat temp which im sure you agree?

so if this can be done but a more efficient way to heat the radiators and pumped 70% faster then it WILL produce the required temp in the room.

so lets do the maths...... 15 degrees equals 30-40% savings just on the temprature

Hiya Shaun, had another thought. I did the above, but in reverse, a few years ago, and I'm guessing you won't find many examples of that, so hopefully my situation would be of interest to you.

I was fed up with some whistling through the TRV's when they were at the point of shutting down.

So, I turned the pump speed down from max (III) to middle (II) and turned the water temp up a bit to compensate. House temp, and TRV settings remained the same.

Whilst my gas usage has varied a bit with weather, it generally comes in at around £500 (say £300 for heating, £100 for S/C and £100 for DHW and cooking). Shouldn't I have seen a 30% to 40% increase in gas for heating (£90 to £120)?

Just wondering.

Mart.

zeupater

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Thanks for the info, but .....

Last year I had new TRV's (10) and the system flushed. Ok, I flushed it myself, so total cost was about £15 for cleaner and inhibitor. And I paid the plumber £100 for changing the TRV's which I got for approx £100, so £215 all in. Obviously would have been slightly higher if he'd had to spend an hour flushing the system, and popped round briefly the week before to add the cleaner - but he didn't.

£1k to £3k for a new control system ...... as opposed to £3k for a complete new GCH system!

Am I going crazy, or is this a maths trick. The 2 to 3% per degree saving is on the temp of the house, not the temperature of the water in the GCH system?

Mart.

Hi

Talk about spin .... the logic & figures in the post you referenced almost made my head-spin off ..... :rotfl:

I'd be pretty upset if I paid any more than £0.1-£0.3k for a new control system ... I'm sure that I paid around £50 or so for a programmable thermostat which I fitted myself years ago - it's got all the logic you can possibly shake a stick at and took a whole 15minutes to install (+probably around 2-3hours to set-up the schedule afterwards).

Anyway, I loved the logic and question "... so if the boiler is running at a standard temprature of 75 degrees for a boiler of couple of years old in a 3 bedroom house and you turn it down to 60 degrees it will not satisfy your required room stat temp which im sure you agree? ..." - of course I don't agree, because it's completely wrong. If the output from a boiler is 75C, then it's 75C whatever it's age. As long as the heat being delivered into the house is higher than the rate of loss then the internal temperature will rise, so considering that the radiator sizes are a constant and assuming that the flow rate is equal (there's no reason for it not to be), there is a flow temperature at which the radiators cannot exchange heat to air at the rate of building heat-loss ... this is the same temperature whatever the boiler age.

The only advantage that I could see with an in-line buffer is to potentially smooth thermostatic cycling on older boilers, but with newer units having the ability to modulate output I see no reason why you'd part with a shed-load of cash (at £10k probably 5x the cost of fitting a new condensing boiler) in order to keep an old inefficient unit and running it slightly more efficiently, completely ignoring that it would still be old&inefficient ...

Then there's the pumping it 70% faster making the radiators more efficient .... yes, but by how much ?. The flow speed increase is governed by the law of diminishing returns to a point where further increase has negligible effect. If you take the temperature gradient across the radiator you'd be able to calculate the rate of heat exchange ... increasing the flow simply flattens the gradient, but the effect would depend on the design and balancing of the entire system and would be different in almost every household ...

I'm not in any way connected to the industry, other than being a customer, but I do tend to recognise the pattern of illogical hype & spin when I see it ....

HTH
Z

Shaun1986

Guys, Im not trying spin it in anyway that is not valid.

What i seen when i came on this forum was what appeared to be tradesmen condeming this product when i dont agree with the reason behind it.

Is it over priced ? Yes i would say so.

Doesnt it work ? yes i believe it does and so does thousands of customers and indipendant tests done by different lab tests.

Can it acheive the proposed savings? in the right environment absolutely.

The only objections i can see is regarding the cost to fit this by yourself (DIY) or local plumber friend ect.

If someome is spending £3000 in oil on a yearly bases which i would imagine is the type of customer base these companies target rather than £100 duel fuel. Could this be a real time savings and good investment?

Again i belive so. No matter what it cost to fit or buy ultimately if the savings justify the outlay then were is the problem??

Just like solar panels someone has and will continue to make panels out of plexi glass and black paint that can heat your hot water for hundereds of pounds rather than thousands which reneable energy companies charge, however this after years on the market became accredited and recognised by government bodies because it worked using the sun.

So....... although im sure you guys could build the system and install it for hundereds or maybe thousands but would you guarentee it or even get a patent for it??? highly doubtful.

In my opinion i believe in it..... and by condeming the product and scaring people off you could be doing someone an in justice.

Shaun

WestonDave

Here's some further facts you may wish to comment on Shaun. The company named on the website linked above is Superseal (Home Improvements) Ltd - however that company was dissolved in 1995. The website itself is non compliant with EU regs as it has neither the company registration number nor the VAT registration number disclosed on it.

So regardless of your dubious claims on costs and benefits this is not a well run legally compliant business so people would be well advised to consider those shortcomings when deciding whether the company is likely to reliable to deal with.

Martyn1981

Shaun1986 wrote: »

In my opinion i believe in it..... and by condeming the product and scaring people off you could be doing someone an in justice.

Shaun

Hiya Shaun. Appreciate your polite response, and I apologise if I was overly rude. I also agree with the sentiment in your post that I quoted.

However, couple of things.

Firstly, hopefully you've spotted the mistake now about the temp savings. The DECC 2 to 3% savings relate to heating a house to a lower temperature. The less heat you put in, the lower your bill. You linked that to the water temp of the heating system, and that's not relevant. The temp may have an effect extrapolated etc etc, but the bill savings relate to the house temp, not the water temp. Otherwise, drop the temp by between 33C and 50C and at 2% to 3% savings per degree C you'd have a 100% saving!

I thought you were trying to spin this, if not, fair enough.

Secondly, having read about these last year, and after reading the extremely unconvincing evidence (the fuel savings in the Trinity College Dublin report, are for an oil boiler which appears to be unable to modulate power efficiently (i.e. full power or off)) I asked for some advice from the heating engineers on the Navitron forum. The answers were interesting. In short, for an old oil boiler this might help, perhaps 5 to 15% , but for a modern gas boiler it would do very little.

For the cost, you'd really have to consider alternatives instead. You could buy a better oil boiler, or for £8k probably pay for external wall insulation, or even internal wall insulation and redecorating (assuming CWI isn't possible). Or buy an £8 jumper and turn the stat down a few degrees more.

In short for most people, and certainly those with GCH, this is a bad, bad idea. Personally I'm really into using less energy full stop, but I'd go as far as to point out that at only 2% savings account rate, investing £8k gives you £160 of extra gas to burn each year ...... though hardly green.

Mart.