Checking your space heating

For those keeping their existing heating systems

If you intend to replace your complete heating system very soon, you can skip this section, although parts of it might be relevant for your new system.
If you only intend to replace your boiler and keep everything else, it is still relevant. This is mostly about “wet” systems where hot water from a boiler is fed to radiators, but some of the comments also apply to electric heating.

Community groups often aren’t sure whether their space heating is designed and working correctly. If you tell a heating supplier you are cold, they’ll often suggest a bigger boiler. This is rarely the right solution. It’s less efficient to use an oversized boiler than one that is properly sized for the building. If you aren’t sure about your system, it’s best to call in an independent heating consultant with experience of your kind of building, but we recognise that’s not always possible.

In this section we give some suggestions about things that go wrong that you may be able to check yourselves or ask suppliers about. The kind of answer they give you will be a hint about the quality of service they will provide.

It may seem strange to include this material in a programme that’s mostly about saving energy, but if your system isn’t designed and working properly, it’s wasteful. Users will turn up every control they can find, making the system horribly inefficient. They will also sneak in portable electric heaters. These are expensive to run and often unsafe. They are too easy to leave on accidentally or operate in kitchens and toilets where there is a much risk of them getting wet. Alternatively, if they are too warm, they’ll bring in fans or prop open the emergency exits with fire extinguishers.