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Comment by supersparrow | Hacker News Reader

A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon.

I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.

Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!

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I managed £15k minus £7k of Scottish government incentives, and I managed to avoid replacing all my radiators by .. getting a "hybrid" system which also includes a boiler for HW :/

Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.

This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.

£15k included the solar?

Sadly no, that was a £5k => 3.8kW installation ten years previously. That has long since paid for itself in feed in tariffs.

Was your old boiler a non-combi?

Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.

£20k, jesus!

Condensing boilers became mandatory in UK just over 20 years ago

Whatever about a combi, you probably don't want a non-condensing boiler these days, not with gas the price that it is.

What's the cost savings? Also factoring more expensive purchase, repairs, replacements etc

Ye olde non-condensing boiler is usually about 70% efficient (that is, 70% of the heat from burning the gas goes into your house vs out the exhaust), sometimes worse (60% wouldn't be that out there for old ones). A condensing boiler, _if set up correctly_, will do 90% (95% for the newest models, allegedly). Now, the catch is that it'll only hit 90% if the return water is within a fairly narrow temperature range, so some system balancing is required, and in practice a lot of them end up more like 80%. But given how expensive gas is these days (at least in Europe) that 10-20% saving will handily pay for the cost of the boiler.

Old and new both condensing and both non-combi.

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