When Sarah Beeny and husband, Graham, decided to transform their 18th-century home into a bespoke wedding venue the old boiler came under close scrutiny – and was found wanting…

Keeping your home warm and toasty can be a challenge. So, when Sarah and Graham decided to turn their Grade II* listed family home into a wedding venue, they raised the bar. With 97 rooms to heat and 32 bathrooms to supply with hot water, their existing boiler, if not as old as the original house, was simply not fit for purpose. So when the time came to overhaul the heating – they dedicated a whole room to the job.

Initially, they wanted to go down the green route and looked into a combination of solar, ground source, air source and wood pellet systems. ‘Sadly, we didn’t have the extra £200,000 it would take,’ says Sarah, ‘so we went for as-green-as-possible. So, Rise is really well draughtproofed, to keep in the heat we do make, and really good thermostats enable us control where and how much heat we produce to the best of our ability.’

Understanding how a boiler works was key to installing the right system. ‘If you get your head around how a boiler works, then you can see why one would work in your home better than another,’ says Sarah. ‘A huge amount of research went into ensuring that we get piping hot water with great pressure in every room in the house. And it’s not just the boiler, it’s the rest of the system you use that massively affects its performance, your bank balance and the environment.’

The key components of a pressurised system in boiler room are this: 

• The boiler.
• The hot water cylinder.
• The pump.
• The controls.

The boiler
‘This is effectively a large block of metal,’ says Sarah. ‘Inside this, fuel will be burnt (oil, gas, wood, etc), and there are a series of metal pipes that pass through the burning flames
that get very hot. Water then passes through these pipes to heat it up and it’s this hot water that flows around your system. ‘Condensing boilers (that are now compulsory to fit) work on the same  principle, but also take the fumes from the burning process and pass them through further pipes, which in turn are surrounded by the water to ensure that as much heat as humanly possible is extracted from the process and used and not wasted.

‘This water circulates around your radiators making them hot and also circulates around the internal workings of your hot water cylinder to heat the water that comes out of your hot taps. Worcester Bosch (www.worcester-bosch.co.uk) is one of the oldest manufacturers of boilers and also one of the most reliable – they have supplied over half a million boilers over the last 50-odd years and have 42% of the market. Personally, I would utterly recommend them.’

The cylinder
‘Your hot water cylinder works like a giant kettle. Most hot water cylinders have a couple of coils of metal like springs inside them. The hot water from your boiler is passed through these coils making them hot – the remainder of the tank is full of cold water from the mains supply, which sits inside this cylinder until the hot metal coil heats it up enough for you to use for your bath or shower.

‘At Rise we used a far more efficient cylinder called Tank-in-Tank made by ACV Cylinders (www.acv-uk.com). It has a corrugated inner layer inside the cylinder instead of the coils, meaning that the water is heated far quicker and far more efficiently. So you can use all the hot water in the tank and top it up again far, far faster than most cylinders. This means the boiler has to work less hard thereby burning less fuel and costing you and the environment less along the way.’

The pump
Next up, you need to get the hot water from the hot water cylinder to your hot tap. ‘In a small house or flat this shouldn’t take too long,’ says Sarah, ‘but in a larger house you may find you need to run the tap for a while to use up the cold water in the pipe work before it’s replaced by the hot water from the cylinder. To avoid wasting water like this, you can fit a pump to force the water around the system so you get hot water the instant you turn on the tap. We used Grundfos pumps (www.grundfos.co.uk) which is the leader in this field. The downside is that you’ll lose some heat from the water itself as it circulates around the system. But if you properly lag your pipes this loss should be minimal and it’s better than wasting pints of water before you find a hot bit. A pump can also be set to ensure it’s only pumping the water around at the time that you are likely to want to use it.’

The controls
As the final element of an efficient boiler room, ‘controls are key’ says Sarah. ‘The thermostat enables you to decide where you want to heat and by how much. Eighty-four per cent of the energy used in homes goes to heating and hot water (not lighting as many believe) – it’s expensive financially and environmentally to heat rooms or water you don’t use. Honeywell (www.honeywellUK.com) has a huge selection of thermostats to help you control the heat in your home – use them and use them well and you will reap the rewards.’