Boilermate thermal stores - what do they do? And why do I have one in the first place?

Boilermate owners are often puzzled about why their house builders fitted such a large and apparently complicated-looking appliance. After all, many houses have just a plain copper cylinder for hot water and a gas boiler in the kitchen, or even just a combi boiler in the kitchen to provide both hot water and central heating.

The Boilermate is a ‘thermal store’. While an ordinary central heating system has a boiler that lights and warms up the radiators when the house is cool, and lights to warm up the hot water tank when the tank gets cool, a thermal store works slightly differently. It is a tankful of radiator water heated in advance by the gas boiler (or oil, or solid fuel boiler). This means that when the heating is required, the radiators get hot within a minute or two of switching it ON rather than the 15 or 20 minutes a conventional heating system takes to warm up itself and all the cold rads. This gives you a much more responsive heating system which apparently according to Gledhill, is slightly more fuel efficient too.

The main advantage of a thermal store however is high pressure hot water. A conventional copper hot water cylinder supplies water at quite low pressure meaning showers in modern houses would not work very well unless a pump (or pumps) is installed. The thermal store delivers hot water at cold mains pressure to all the hot water outlets so showers and hot taps work brilliantly without noisy pumps. A combi boiler produced high pressure hot water too but only at very low flow rates. Even the biggest combi cannot run two decent modern showers at the same time, which a Boilermate can do with ease.

Check the pages in this section for a detailed discussion of your particular version of Boilermate.

If your Boilermate has stopped working, call or text me to discuss a repair on 07866 766364.

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