Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Yeah. In the US basically every shower is hooked up to the same hot water source as everything else in the house, which, traditionally, is a thirty to fifty gallon insulated tank constantly kept at temperature by an electric or gas heating device, called a "hot water heater", though there have been significant inroads made by tankless water heaters in the last ten years or so.


Significant inroads yes, but the installers - at least in california - have not caught up yet. When I got my place over here it had a 30+ year old boiler which was dead, plus a huge hot water tank thing.... so I got a super-efficient combination boiler installed for the underfloor heating (original 1950's pipework!) plus hot water, meaning I could lose the tank heater. I picked a Laars 330 which appears to be a Baxi 330 in the UK.

It's great, apart from:

a) the installer didn't have a combustion analyzer and hence couldn't set it up in the first place until he bought one. Seems that you don't need anything like that to install "normal" boilers

b) it's now in a state where we pretty much don't get hot water unless we turn the heating on first. For some unknown reason the controller on the boiler just cycles the flame on and off if we turn the shower on, giving you lukewarm but never hot water.

If the boiler is lit already, heating the underfloor pipes, and switches to hot water (water always takes priority) then we have all the hot water we ever need.

More than a year later and he's still coming back and looking confused, and claiming the distributors of the boiler just don't give him any tech support. I've now installed a webcam pointing at the status lights on the boiler so I know, when I turn the tap on, whether the boiler is going to cycle or actually stay lit... yes, it's that ridiculous frown

I would break out the soldering iron, scope, meter and so on but gas frightens me...