Home central heating & hot water needs to be upgraded - what should we be thinking about moving to?

lohr500

@TemmyTemjin

For what it is worth, my view is the same as that suggested by matelodave.

As you already have the infrastructure in place to support an oil boiler, just replace the old boiler with a modern high efficiency condensing boiler. It will be your lowest cost option right now both in terms of installation and running costs.

I would look at a boiler that comes with a 10 year parts and labour warranty so you have peace of mind. It may cost a little more than a cheaper/shorter warranty version, but no worries then over any expensive repairs for the next 10 years.

About 2 years ago I decided on a 32kW External Grant Vortex Blue Flame boiler to replace our antiquated oil boiler.

The old boiler was getting increasingly difficult to keep going due to lack of spares and even when brand new it only had a published efficiency of 70%

To preserve the 10 year warranty, our boiler had to be installed and then serviced annually by a Grant G1 approved engineer. Cost for last years service was around £70 from memory which included an inspection of the oil tank.

The total cost to replace the old boiler was just over £5100.

This included :

• Removal and disposal of the old boiler.
• Relocating the boiler from inside the kitchen to outside which freed up kitchen space. (Directly on opposite side of external wall to where the old boiler was).
• Fitting a magnetic filter to the boiler flow system.
• Fitting motorised valves to the hot water and central heating pipework loops.
• Fitting one larger radiator in a room which never got warm enough with the previous undersized radiator.
• Plumbing in a plinth heater which I had previously wired in and fitted in place but not connected to the CH loop. 

We went for motorised valves as the old system didn't have them. This meant that the hot water circuit relied solely on thermal circulation to move hot water around the immersion tank heating coil. And when we were running the boiler for hot water only, thermal circulation also resulted in the upstairs radiators warming up, which wasn't ideal unless we shut down the radiator valves in the summer. Your setup could be the same. If you don't have any motorised valves on the system, then I would consider getting them fitted when the install is being carried out.

Based on similar run times we are now using around 30% less oil than before.

Other things to consider.

We already had a Hive thermostat/boiler controller which could be used for the new boiler. If your thermostat/controller is very old, you may want to consider replacing this to give you more flexible timer options, etc.

If you do go down the oil route, make sure the boiler is HVO compatible to give some future proofing and longer term options on fuel. Our Grant Vortex Blue Flame version is NOT HVO friendly due to the blue flame combustion process.

Depending on the age of your oil tank, build an emergency fund to cover the cost of a replacement tank in the next 10 years or so. They don't last forever although there will be 1000's out there well past 20 years+ old.

We did look at Air Source Heat Pumps before deciding to stick with oil, but due to the size and nature of our old farm house the numbers just didn't stack up. And that was at the time when grants of close to £12k were available and electricity prices were much lower relative to oil prices. In our case, we would also have needed to upgrade the electrical supply to three phase at goodness knows what cost. 

Anyway, good luck with your decision making process.