Floor standing or wall hanged? In terms of installation one can consider the wall hung and the floor standing boilers. Wall hung boilers are characterised by their short dimensions and moderate power outputs. There are several types of these boilers on the market that are designed to meet different needs. There are boilers with hot [...]

Closed combustion boilers? More and more gas boilers proposed on the market have a socalled closed combustion chamber. The air needed for the combustion is taken from outside the house and brought in the combustion where it is mixed with gas and burned. The combustion products are evacuated by fan from the boiler through a [...]

Boilers and water temperature Considering the working temperature, the manufacturers are proposing three main types of boilers on the market: condensing, low temperature and standard. A condensing boiler is a boiler designed to recover more waste heat, and particularly the heat from water vapour produced during the combustion of fossil fuels A low temperature boiler [...]

Sanitary hot water production The sanitary hot water can be produced through different technologies. A significant part is produced by “Combi” hot water boilers that produce both space heating and sanitary hot water. The other solution is a water heater, a kind of boiler that is designed to produce exclusively sanitary hot water. This can [...]

Case losses in boilers To ensure heating, the boiler runs with cycles of start/stop, which depends mainly of the heat demand. During operation, the temperature of the boiler walls rises up above the ambient air temperature, due to the heat released by the combustion process. When the boiler stops, the boiler surfaces temperatures are still [...]

What is efficiency? The boiler efficiency is the ratio of the energy input to output. This means that high efficiency boilers require less fuel input to produce the same amount of heat to the system as lower efficiency boilers. In any boiler there are heat losses, some in the flue (the combustion products are hot [...]

Potterton NetaHeat One of Potterton’s better efforts in my opinion. If you have one in good condition, it’s well worth looking after. A ground-breaking design originating in the late 1970′s. One of the first (if not THE first) ever to have automatic spark ignition instead of a permanent pilot light, and a fan assisted flue. [...]

Quite a neat little boiler on the face of it, cheap and popular. But I don’t like them (you guessed that from my first sentence didn’t you? ) Uses the same heat exchanger as the most excellent Vaillant EcoMAX, but there the similarity ends. The HXi seems terribly prone to nuisance overheat thermostat tripping. And [...]

Potterton Promax SL, HE and HE Plus This Potterton Promax review excludes the Potterton Promax System HE Plus / Combi HE Plus which, despite sharing the Promax name, is a completely different boiler. None of the comments here apply to the Promax System HE Plus or the Combi HE Plus Confusingly, as mentioned above, the [...]

Boiler reviews Glow Worm Energy Saver… The Glow Worm Energy Saver is a early example of a low water content condensing boiler. (‘Low water content’ boilers have heat exchangers constructed from cooper tubing with heat-collecting fins attached, as opposed to having a conventional, one-piece cast iron heat exchanger.) Like most early condensing boilers the Energy [...]