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About half of your annual energy costs go towards heating and hot water, so an efficient boiler is important.

Upgrading your boiler could save you around £320 each year on heating bills – using October 2024 prices. This is based on a semi-detached home on mains gas, upgrading from a G-rated boiler to an A-rated condensing boiler with full heating controls. The savings are even greater for larger properties and for heating systems that run on oil.

Today’s central heating boilers are much better than the old ones. They can heat water more efficiently, meaning they use less gas or oil to do the same job. This saves energy and will save you money.

Building regulations specify that if you’re replacing an old boiler the new one must be A-rated for energy efficiency. This will almost certainly be a condensing boilers.

What is a condensing boiler?

Condensing boilers are more efficient because they extract the heat from the hot exhaust gases (or ‘flue gases’) that all boilers produce. Non-condensing boilers simply expel the hot gases into the air and the heat is wasted.

You’ll notice that the vapour that comes out of a condensing boiler’s flue forms a visible plume of ‘steam’. This is actually a mixture of water vapour and other gases. It’s perfectly normal and is an indication that the gases are cooler than those vented by non-condensing boilers.

Combination boilers

Condensing boilers come in both combination and regular models. A combination (or ‘combi’) boiler will provide your central heating and produce hot water on demand, firing up when you turn on a hot tap in the kitchen or bathroom.

A regular boiler will do your central heating, but rather than produce hot water on demand, it will heat a quantity of water which is held in a storage cylinder until required.

Some boilers only run the central heating and don’t provide hot water at all. In this case an electric immersion tank or another form of water heating is required.

What is flue gas heat recovery

If you have a non-condensing boiler, you could fit a flue gas heat recovery system. This is a device that captures and re-uses heat that would otherwise have escaped out of your flue or chimney, making boilers more efficient. As much as 35% of this heat is wasted when the gases are expelled.

This system uses the hot flue gas to pre-heat the cold water being fed into the boiler. This means the boiler doesn’t need to work as hard to provide you with hot water. Flue gas heat recovery systems significantly improve the performance of boilers. This means they use less gas or oil, saving you money on your bills.