What is my heating system

almoststew1990 · 9 Oct 2019 at 19:03

We bought a place with no central heating fully prepared to put gas central heating in.

The house is from 1972 and appears to have its original heating system (I assume original). Its an enormous water / oil tank in the centre of the house that heats up offpeak for cheap and then bleeds heat throughout the day, in theory. It only comes on offpeak. We've left it switched on so that when offpeak starts (again, no idea what time that is), it will power on. So far it's come on for one night (the switch panel was lit up and making a loud "electric noise" which was slightly concerning.

Anyway, any electricians here have any idea what this actually is? I can't seem to find any similar storage heaters online.

(we've turned it back off now)

Haze · 9 Oct 2019 at 19:11

Looks scary old lol

pastymuncher · 9 Oct 2019 at 19:22

We had something similar to that when I was in married quarters while based at RAF St. Mawgan in 1990. It was a sort of ducted night storage heater. That unit came on overnight and built the heat up and let it out during the day depending on what you set it to. There were no wall mounted heaters and it had underfloor ducting with vents in the floor. It looked much neater with no wall mounted heaters but in practice you still had areas where you couldn't put any furniture because of the ducts.

eviled · 9 Oct 2019 at 21:57

http://www.storageheater.co.uk/creda-electricaire-1/creda-a-electricaire/75231-a15-99wm/75253.html

is it this ?

almoststew1990 · 9 Oct 2019 at 22:34

eviled said:
http://www.storageheater.co.uk/creda-electricaire-1/creda-a-electricaire/75231-a15-99wm/75253.html

is it this ?

Well damn, yeah that's it.

pastymuncher said:
We had something similar to that when I was in married quarters while based at RAF St. Mawgan in 1990. It was a sort of ducted night storage heater. That unit came on overnight and built the heat up and let it out during the day depending on what you set it to. There were no wall mounted heaters and it had underfloor ducting with vents in the floor. It looked much neater with no wall mounted heaters but in practice you still had areas where you couldn't put any furniture because of the ducts.

Yeah it's located centrally in the house with vents on all four sides of it to vent the hot air into the lounge, kitchen and hallway.

So it's actually got a fan to blow hot air around the vents by the look of it :s

NoobCannon · 9 Oct 2019 at 22:43

Can honestly say ive never seen one of those before.

will get a load of space back if you replace it with a combi

martin363 · 10 Oct 2019 at 07:15

Takes me back. we had one of those in our house in the 70's, made a whack tonne of noise when the fan cut in, had ducted hot air coming out vents in the floor. I remember the motor blew and I thought it was xmas as the gave me the old one to play with.

Doobedoo · 10 Oct 2019 at 10:25

I think we had something like that in our house originally, the unit is gone but we still have the ducting in place under the floorboards in our bedroom.

The misses old man said it was originally a blow heater and all the houses around us had them.

I wonder if you could use a split unit air-con system to blow through the vents? Would be a lot more efficient if you could.

psd99 · 10 Oct 2019 at 11:38

wow that looks very old

Lopéz · 11 Oct 2019 at 13:56

Storage heaters were all the rage for a while. Not really that common nowadays.

BigBoy · 11 Oct 2019 at 16:26

Lopéz said:
Storage heaters were all the rage for a while. Not really that common nowadays.

Yes they are, I see them every day, it all depends on your geographical area, in Bath it was decided by most inner city land owners that it would be too expensive to convert to gas so night stores are the norm.

Jez · 12 Oct 2019 at 10:48

BigBoy said:
Yes they are, I see them every day, it all depends on your geographical area, in Bath it was decided by most inner city land owners that it would be too expensive to convert to gas so night stores are the norm.

Are people really still fitting storage heaters? I live away from the gas network and all legacy heating here is either LPG or Oil, with most modern houses being built with ASHP/AC or Geothermal. I am starting a barn conversion soon (obviously no gas) which will be AC, I didn’t even consider storage heaters as an option to be honest.

The last storage heater I think I saw was in a flat I’ve got from the 1980s

BigBoy · 12 Oct 2019 at 14:00

Jez said:
Are people really still fitting storage heaters? I live away from the gas network and all legacy heating here is either LPG or Oil, with most modern houses being built with ASHP/AC or Geothermal. I am starting a barn conversion soon (obviously no gas) which will be AC, I didn’t even consider storage heaters as an option to be honest.

The last storage heater I think I saw was in a flat I’ve got from the 1980s

I agree it's not often you see a new install with storage heaters. But there are large portions of the country where they only have the existing night stores (mainly in rented accommodation as it's cheap to install and maintain), available to them. I can think of two homes j have visited in the last year that have switche'd from gas to night stores both because they didn't like the thought of gas in the house! (Don't ask me I just do what I'm told!!)

There are literally thousands of homes with night stores as the only source of heating.

fastwunz · 12 Oct 2019 at 15:25

It’s the original ducted warm air heating system. Very common for houses of this age. I’m surprised it still works but then again, if it’s been maintained then no reason it shouldn’t.

when you get it removed, make sure any asbestos is also dealt with - including lagging and flues.

jellybeard999 · 13 Oct 2019 at 16:11

When we bought our house, despite the house having a gas supply (but no meter - it was capped off) and every other house on the estate having gas central heating afaik, the original purchasers opted for storage heaters when they bought the house in the 1960s :eek:

As ours didn't have a boiler, we don't have a chimney either, which every other house does. I assume they were originally back boilers. Our next door neighbour is the original owner of his house, and knew the original owners of ours well, they lived there from the 1960s until around 2000 when they passed away. He remembers them opting for storage heaters when they bought the house... they thought it was newer/more modern tech apparently. It's a relatively spacious 3 bed semi and had 3 storage heaters throughout the whole house :eek:

As we had already planned a full renovation, this didn't bother us and we fitted gas central heating straight away, but i'm still surprised it hadn't been converted by any of the previous owners.

almoststew1990 · 9 Nov 2019 at 14:21

Thread bump time!

Paul the Gas Man came round to look at what our options are to replace it with conventional gas central heating. He had never seen one before in his 20 years going around houses for Southern Electric and however many years going around houses for British Gas. He said it would be hard to just replace our current electric heater with gas central heating in situ as we have concrete floors, the heater cupboard is nowhere near an outside wall for a flue, nowhere near the water pipes or an outside drain. If we put a boiler next to the sink on an outside wall we would still be getting pipes through the concrete floors downstairs, and upstairs the floor would need to come up...

...Annoyingly we have just put laminate flooring down. This was all booked in the day we completed on our house to be installed before we moved in (1 month notice at our old rental place). Due to bs reasons it actually went down about 2 weeks ago! We want to avoid ripping this up at all costs

Lesson learned - get heating sorted before installing nice new floor.

Paul the Gas Man says our best bet is an electric boiler as the electric infrastructure is already there. The water pipes to the radiators downstairs would be minimal as we wanted radiators located near to this boiler thing anyway. Upstairs a bit harder and the pipes would go into the loft and back down again, avoiding doing anything to our new floor. The airing cupboard is directly above the heater cupboard so those vertical pipes can go straight into the roof. Radiator locations in red.

Ground floor

Upstairs

Getting a Electricaire specialist out to fix the current one is looking more tempting now, although I don't know how good it actually is and if it is killing us by blowing asbestos fibres everywhere (comforting).

I guess we could have a box thing above the kitchen door, between the under the stairs cupboard and the heater room, containing the flue (if that is allowed to be ), gas pipe and water pipes...

Jez · 9 Nov 2019 at 14:37

I have an electric boiler, it is very good and very neat, silent, perfect.

Big downside is that it chews power extremely heavily. Make sure that you are happy to shoulder this. The reason we went this route is because i didnt want to keep the oil boiler and massive garden tank as we are outside of a gas area.

We now plan to sell the house medium term so i think i will leave it, but if we were to stay longer term i think i would go to the hassle and expense of an air source system to supplement it. If i could get gas i'd definitely do that.

norm · 9 Nov 2019 at 15:14

almoststew1990 said:
Thread bump time!

Paul the Gas Man came round to look at what our options are to replace it with conventional gas central heating. He had never seen one before in his 20 years going around houses for Southern Electric and however many years going around houses for British Gas. He said it would be hard to just replace our current electric heater with gas central heating in situ as we have concrete floors, the heater cupboard is nowhere near an outside wall for a flue, nowhere near the water pipes or an outside drain. If we put a boiler next to the sink on an outside wall we would still be getting pipes through the concrete floors downstairs, and upstairs the floor would need to come up...

...Annoyingly we have just put laminate flooring down. This was all booked in the day we completed on our house to be installed before we moved in (1 month notice at our old rental place). Due to bs reasons it actually went down about 2 weeks ago! We want to avoid ripping this up at all costs Lesson learned - get heating sorted before installing nice new floor.

Paul the Gas Man says our best bet is an electric boiler as the electric infrastructure is already there. The water pipes to the radiators downstairs would be minimal as we wanted radiators located near to this boiler thing anyway. Upstairs a bit harder and the pipes would go into the loft and back down again, avoiding doing anything to our new floor. The airing cupboard is directly above the heater cupboard so those vertical pipes can go straight into the roof. Radiator locations in red.

Ground floor

Upstairs

Getting a Electricaire specialist out to fix the current one is looking more tempting now, although I don't know how good it actually is and if it is killing us by blowing asbestos fibres everywhere (comforting).

I guess we could have a box thing above the kitchen door, between the under the stairs cupboard and the heater room, containing the flue (if that is allowed to be ), gas pipe and water pipes...

You can fit a boiler and all the gubbins in your loft space and run pipes from there. With regards to your laminate floor if it isn't glued you can quite easily lift and relay it, you might have to sacrifice your skirting boards if you've fixed them on top but that's a minor expense in the grand scheme. The cost savings from a gas setup would likely pay for it.

b0rn2sk8 · 9 Nov 2019 at 21:44

Would a heat pump not make more sense if gas isn't an option?

NoobCannon · 9 Nov 2019 at 21:53

norm said:
You can fit a boiler and all the gubbins in your loft space and run pipes from there. With regards to your laminate floor if it isn't glued you can quite easily lift and relay it, you might have to sacrifice your skirting boards if you've fixed them on top but that's a minor expense in the grand scheme. The cost savings from a gas setup would likely pay for it.

this, bring all the ch pipes down in the room corners and box them in. id be doing everything possible to enable a proper central heating system to be installed.