We’ve just completed a very interesting job from a mechanical installation point a view. The job, sub contracted through a local builder, involved converting an old barn into a beautiful house with incredible views over the South Downs. The specification was to fit the boiler, cylinder, tank, pump and valves in the utility room which is inside the smaller of the 2 buildings about 10 metres away from the main building. To take the heat from the boiler and hot water into the main building involved laying some huge, pre lagged Uponor pipework. Lagged well enough to ensure negligible heat loss as it ran through the ground into the main building.

 

This house has 3 bathrooms and a WC so to ensure sufficient pressure and flow rates at all outlets we installed a Lowara booster set. This booster was set to 4 bar and the beauty of it is that it will maintain that pressure no matter how many outlets are opened. The flow rates achieved from this set up were incredible! With large bore pipework we could actually fill the bath in around a minute. The booster was fed from a 600 litre pre-insulated GRP tank to ensure plenty of back up with a 360 litre Oso Powercyl providing enough hot water for maximum occupancy. We also fitted a circulator on the hot water to constantly pump around the domestic hot water circuit. This ensured that even though the cylinder was quite far away from the draw off points the time it would take from turning on the tap to getting hot water was only 3 or 4 seconds.

 

The house was quite open plan downstairs so the owners opted for an underfloor heating system which was zoned to allow independent control of each of the rooms. Upstairs we fitted some smart Stelrad Planar panel radiators which gave a modern look.

We fitted 2 Waterking electronic scale reducers to minimise scale build up on appliances and brassware.

All in all a challenging job but one I am really pleased about.