Electric Boiler help!

waingels

Suspect yellow pump 

Reed_Richards

If I were in your situation I would be looking at options to replace the electric boiler with something cheaper to run.

waingels

lohr500 said:

If you feel competent enough to isolate the power and remove the covers, you could check the data plates inside the housings.

Think I'll leave that to the capable hands of the baxi engineer when they arrive . Given the pipework connected to both boilers it appears the original idea behind installation was to operate both boilers, maybe with the second to meet high demand. 
The boiler on left ( labelled C900) doesn't have any electrical wires connected to the unit.

waingels

matelodave said:

If its got a 6kw element then it will take six kw and will use 6kwh in one hour. What else is turned on, I guess its got a pump, what about your fridge, freezer, TV, SKY box, router and any other of the myriad of stuff that you dont realise is working. Is there an immersion heater in your hot water tank that's switched on.

Unfortunately heating your place with a flow boiler is actually the most expensive way you could choose apart from burning real £5 notes in a grate. There is really no way to reduce the consumption except by turning it down or off. IMHO they should be illegal. Even using an oil filled radiator in one room at a time can work out less expensive to run than a flow boiler.

The only way to reduce the cost of heating is to either  get on the cheapest tariff you can find or find somewhere else to live. 

The other appliances are really energy efficient , I always aim to get A rated or above . I've tested the boiler with everything else turned off. We live in a small mews in London with no gas connections. Ive only just moved in , but already trying to rally the troops and get gas installed , my previous property was a Victorian flat with gas boiler , and was significantly cheaper to heat compared to this house which was built in 2008!

MWT

Based on your findings so far I'd say it is highly probably that the covers got swapped between the units.

With the immersion turned off you'd need to have another electric heater of some kind running to get from 6kW to 8.5kW, far more likely it is actually a 9kW device.

macman

I'm frankly amazed by your amazement re. the huge cost. Electricity on a single rate meter is maybe 14p per kWh. Gas is 4p per kWh. So the bills are going to be c. 350% higher. Simples...
Yes, a property built in 2008 will be much better insulated than a Victorian-era flat with no cavity walls, and an electric boiler is 100% efficient, compared to a gas boiler at maybe 85%, but even those two factors combined don't begin to offset the huge unit cost difference of the two fuels.
Did you not consider this before purchase?
If main gas is not an option, then the only route is to replace the wet CH system with NSH's and an immersion heater running on E7.

lohr500

Another option if you can't get gas piped in and you have room outside for the unit is an Air Source Heat Pump. Mixed reviews and needs a very good installation company to make sure it will work and be cost effective, but in smaller properties they can work very well. It wouldn't be as cost effective to run as gas and more expensive to install, but with a typical COP value of 3, for every kW of electricity you put in, you can get 3kW of heat energy out.

There are Govt RHI grants available to cover a fair chunk of the installation costs but these are paid in instalments over a 7 year period. But if you sell the property you no longer receive the payments. The new owners can apply to receive the balance of any payments (also in instalments), but that's not much use to the seller who has invested up front in the installation. I guess it could be argued that the property value is worth more with ASHP heating rather than all electric, so as a seller you could recover the initial outlay in the selling price. 

We looked into it for our old farmhouse, but due to the age and size of the property, the poor insulation and the fact that it would have needed a very large ASHP with a beefed up mains electricity supply to the house, it just wasn't viable.

Might be worth considering.

Gerry1

The cynic in me wonders whether the vendors found that running the two boilers was bankrupting them, so they disconnected one and swapped the covers over to make it look like the flat only needed a 6kW boiler to hoodwink the inspector (and the purchaser)?

lohr500

The same thought crossed my mind!

MWT

Gerry1 said:

The cynic in me wonders whether the vendors found that running the two boilers was bankrupting them, so they disconnected one and swapped the covers over to make it look like the flat only needed a 6kW boiler to hoodwink the inspector (and the purchaser)?

I wasn't going to go there, but yes, I would rank that as very plausible.