The biggest room in the world…….

…….is the room for improvement

With the rapidly changing landscape of domestic heating and heating products, we felt it was an excellent time to visit Worcester Bosch and Vaillant in Leeds to update our skills and understanding of their latest products.

The photo show Richard Weir (MD) next to a Vaillant central heating boiler invented in 1924 and claimed to be the first domestic central heating system in the world.

ErP is here On the 26^th September 2015 the government introduced the ErP process which requires anyone installing new heating products to comply with the new ErP legislation. Plumbers and heating system designers are responsible for ensuring that all components in the system meet with the directive in terms of their energy rating. The whole system must be assessed and an ENERG rating document printed off and given to the customer. This document will be needed by a new buyer if the home is sold.

Turbidity and suspended solids testing. In addition to learning about their products, we gained further valuable insight into the effect that poor water quality can have on a heating system. Also how to measure whether a system is likely to run into maintenance problems due to its water quality. Many people will have heard of chemicals can be injected into a heating system to clean and protect them during their life. However a higher level of preventative maintenance is now required with modern boilers in the form of magnetic filters to actively remove the ferrous oxide built up from the corrosion of steel parts within the system such as radiators. For systems that are already bunged up with sludge there are methods and chemicals available to release the debris and bring the radiators back to near factory efficiency. More details available at http://www.kamco.co.uk/turbiditytube.html

Vaillant presented their ecoTEC Pro combination boilers. They are very impressive boilers armed with a host of user and engineer digital features to enable the system to be fine tuned to a customer’s preferences. They allow detailed technical set up and diagnosis without having to attach pressure and temperature gauges, which saves time and cost onsite. Technologies such as weather compensation (already in use by Viessmann for the past 5 years), internal/external temperature synchronisation, electronic pump modulation and advanced range rating technology for rented properties were also explained in great detail.

Worcester Bosch also presented their latest boilers which have won “Which, best buy” awards for the past 6 years. Their boilers are real quality products which also have a very intelligent micro computer at the centre of the boiler collecting performance data and logging issues which can be interpreted by the engineer through a special set of menus. Their course also focused on fault finding and component removal and refitting. This allowed us to pick up a few tip and tricks in order to make the maintenance easier and reduce downtime for the customer. The trainers were kind enough to give all attendees a useful credit card size circuit testing card, pictured opposite, which allows quick and easy testing of the boilers many sensors and switches.