Combi Boilers Are A Great Invention

By Author: Carolyn Clayton
Total Articles: 130
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Combi boilers are a great invention. They combine heating your home and giving you hot water perfectly. They are small and can be stored in a cupboard. They only heat water when the tap is turned on which makes perfect sense. Keeping a huge cylinder of water hot seems wasteful and not very environmentally friendly. Around half of new houses with one bedroom which are being built today will have a combination boiler installed as the choice of heating system. They are the most energy efficient and reliable boilers.

You will save money if you change from the old system boilers to a combi boiler. Running costs are seriously reduced as you only pay for fuel when you use it. Rather than heat up a tank and the boiler works to keep this at the right temperature, with a combi the boiler only kicks in and heats water when a tap is run.

Buying a modern boiler today will mean you will only get a 'A' rated high efficiently condensing boiler. These boilers come in combis, system and heat only boilers. Depending on the size of your house and your hot water requirements will depend what to boiler is best for you. If ...
... you live in a small house or medium sized with just one bathroom a combination boiler is most suited to your needs. You will not need any room for a storage tanks as with a combi they are not needed.

Boiler consists of various components which transfer the heat energy from fuel to a heating system. The beauty of the new condensing boilers is that they have more than one heat exchanger. This means they ref-use any lost energy which would have been lost thorough a flu. A condensing boiler will capture this lost gas/energy and then take it through a second heat exchanger to be turned back into usable heat.

System boilers are suited when there is more than one bathroom. There is a storage tank in system boilers which are normally placed in a airing cupboard. The only disadvantages are that the water isn't instant as the storage tank needs to be warmed up first, and then you can use as many taps, showers as you want. If the water runs out you have to wait until the storage tank is reheated. These types of boilers are also called sealed systems.

Heat only boilers are what many older homes have. They are similar to the system boiler in that a storage cylinder is required, but also a feed tank in the attic is needed. This isn't so great if your thinking of doing an attic conversion at some point.

All of these boiler systems can use either gas or oil to run them. With oil you will also need room to store the oil, normally in a tank in the garden.
Northern Gas Heating - the UK's local supplier of new Combi Boiler including the energy efficient Condensing boiler.