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Hot Water Cylinder Replacement
Old or failing cylinders removed and replaced. Fully qualified for unvented systems, which is a legal requirement and rules out a good many engineers.
Call Julian 07831 718509Almost all of Julian's work comes from repeat customers and recommendations. Over forty years, that is the only measure that means anything.
Plumbing services › Hot water cylinder replacement
Hot water cylinders do not usually fail suddenly. They get slower, they hold less, and they lose more heat to the cupboard than to the taps. By the time most households ring, the cylinder has been quietly costing them money for several winters.
Julian removes the old cylinder and fits a modern one, across Bristol and roughly ten miles around Staple Hill. Where the replacement is an unvented cylinder he holds the qualification that legally requires, which a good number of engineers do not.
This page is about replacing a cylinder that already exists. If you are converting from a combi and putting a cylinder in where there was none, that is covered under unvented hot water cylinders.
A cylinder should heat water, not the cupboard. If that space is noticeably warm, the insulation has failed and you are paying to heat a cupboard every time the boiler fires. On older foam-lagged cylinders this is very common.
Sediment and scale build up in the bottom of a cylinder over the years and take up space that used to hold water. Nothing has broken, the cylinder is simply smaller inside than it was.
Copper cylinders eventually corrode. A small weep at a joint or staining underneath is the warning shot. Cylinders hold a lot of water, and a failure in an upstairs cupboard is an expensive way to find out.
Slow recovery usually means the coil inside is scaled up, so heat from the boiler is no longer transferring properly into the water. Descaling rarely fixes it for long at that stage.
A replacement is the one sensible moment to change type. It costs little more to do it now than to do it later as a separate job.
Fed by a tank in the loft, driven by gravity. The cheapest and quickest swap, and it keeps the existing pipework and controls. Shower pressure upstairs stays modest, because gravity is doing the work.
Fed straight off the mains, so every tap and shower runs at mains pressure. The loft tanks come out and that space is freed up. Needs adequate incoming flow rate, which gets measured before it is ever recommended.
An unvented cylinder is a sealed pressurised vessel with safety devices that must be correct. Installing one requires a specific qualification on top of Gas Safe registration. Julian holds it. Anyone who cannot show it should not be touching one.
Julian will tell you which suits your house. In a bungalow with poor mains flow, unvented can be worse than what you have. In a two-bathroom house on a good supply, it transforms the showers.
The existing cylinder, the cupboard, the pipework and the mains flow rate all get looked at. Flow rate is the one that decides whether unvented is even an option, and it takes a few minutes to measure properly.
The cylinder is isolated and drained. This is the slow part of the day and there is no way to hurry it. Hot water is off from this point until the new one is filled and heated.
The old cylinder comes out, along with the loft tanks and feed pipework where the house is converting to unvented. Getting a cylinder down a narrow Victorian staircase is often the hardest ten minutes of the job.
Fitted, connected and, on an unvented cylinder, the expansion vessel, pressure relief and discharge pipework all installed to the required standard. That discharge route is not optional and it is where corner-cutting shows up.
Filled, vented, brought up to temperature and every outlet checked. On an unvented cylinder the safety devices are tested and the readings recorded.
Controls and timings explained, paperwork handed over, and the old cylinder taken away. Most like-for-like swaps are a single day. A conversion to unvented usually takes longer.
The standard position in the terraces and semis around Staple Hill, Downend and Fishponds. Access is usually the constraint, not the plumbing.
Still in a surprising number of houses. Copper, thinly lagged, and losing a great deal of heat. Replacing one of these is among the few jobs that pays for part of itself in gas.
In Bradley Stoke and Emersons Green a cylinder replacement is often the moment a household finally fixes the showers, by going unvented at the same time.
Scale shortens the life of the coil inside a cylinder and slows reheating. It is one of the reasons cylinders here rarely reach the age their manufacturer suggests.
Unvented hot water cylinders · Immersion heater installation · Hot water system repair · Water heater installation · New boilers
Replacing like for like on size is the usual assumption and it is not always right. Households change. Children grow up and start taking long showers, or leave home entirely. A bathroom gets added. The cylinder that suited the house in 1998 may be wrong now in either direction.
Too small and you run out during the morning. Too large and you pay to keep water hot that nobody uses, every day, for the life of the cylinder. Julian sizes it against how the household actually behaves in its busiest hour rather than against the footprint of the house, and against the space physically available in the cupboard.
Recovery time matters as much as raw volume. A cylinder that reheats quickly can be smaller than one that does not, and in a busy house that is often the better answer because it takes up less room.
Insulation on a modern cylinder is a great deal better than on one from the seventies or eighties. Older cylinders lose a substantial amount of their heat into the cupboard rather than into the taps, which is why those airing cupboards feel warm. That heat is being paid for.
The coil is what transfers heat from the boiler into the stored water. Modern coils have more surface area and reheat faster, so the boiler runs for less time to achieve the same result.
On a vented system, the loft tank, its float valve and the associated pipework are all things that can leak. Going unvented removes them entirely, along with the risk of a loft tank overflowing while nobody is home.
A cylinder thermostat and a motorised valve, wired correctly, mean the boiler heats water only when water needs heating. A surprising number of older installations have this wrong, or have a thermostat that stopped working years ago.
This is worth being blunt about. An unvented cylinder is a sealed vessel holding a large volume of water under mains pressure. It carries an expansion vessel, a pressure relief valve, a temperature relief valve and a discharge arrangement that has to run to a safe place. If those are wrong, the failure mode is not a leak.
Installing one requires a specific qualification held on top of Gas Safe registration. Julian holds it. Anybody who cannot show you theirs should not be touching an unvented cylinder, and the discharge pipework is usually where corner-cutting becomes visible to somebody who knows what to look for.
Unvented cylinders also need servicing annually, and that is a separate check from a boiler service even though the two are usually booked together. The safety devices and the expansion vessel are tested and the readings recorded. Skipping it is both a safety matter and, on most cylinders, a breach of the manufacturer guarantee.
A practical point on timing. Replacing a cylinder means no hot water for most of a day, and the job is far easier to live with in summer than in February. If yours is showing the early signs, a warm airing cupboard or slower reheating, that is worth acting on while it is still a planned job rather than an emergency. Cylinders that fail properly tend to do it by leaking, and a few hundred litres of water in an upstairs cupboard costs a great deal more than the cylinder did.
Call Julian for a free survey. He will measure your mains flow rate and tell you whether unvented is worth it in your house, or whether like-for-like is the better spend.
Call 07831 718509