Our central heating boiler is an Ideal Elan.

We think it's about 30 years old.

We've been in this house 9 years and in that time, the most we've doen to it is fire it up after come home from our holidays. Other than that, not a thing. It's not on a service contract (they wouldn't take it on) and the closest the gas man has been to it is when he drives along the street en route to someone else's house.
It seems to be as robust and reliable as the bricks that the house is built from.

Other than that, I had to fit a new pump yesterday as the Grundfos one in the airing cupboard seized up and died.
Cost me £50 inc. two new pump valves for a new one from screwfix.

A good friend tells me that I shouldn't dream of replacing the elderly Elan.
His argument is that it's old and simple, but robust with easily available off the shelf parts shoudl it ever actually go wrong.

Thoughts anyone ?

I'm seeing the logic.

Are modern boilers that fragile ?

As long as the spares are available, I'll be keeping my elderly Ideal boiler. It's not the most efficient machine but the cost of a replacement will buy me a lot of gas!

Is kinda my logic too.

If it ain't broken...why fix it!?


Could always add solar if you were looking at ways of (long term) reducing costs.

I have this stupid idea about building some sort of device to capture the lost heat still contained in the flue gases.

A gas to liquid heat exchanger which would heat water and this coudl then thermosyphon to another heat exchanger in the house.

This is all nonsense of course, but my head's full of it.

Wonder if old heater matrices would work

quite a few commercial solutions... just have to be careful not to upset the boiler by restricting exhaust flow.

http://www.alpha-innovation.co.uk/products/GasSaver/GasSaver/1034568137

I fix em for a living, and wouldn't recommend changing it until spares are unavailable or something unfixable happens
blocked heat exchanger etc.....Most modern boilers are shite and have the life expectancy of a butterfly.

I fix em for a living, and wouldn't recommend changing it until spares are unavailable or something unfixable happens
blocked heat exchanger etc.....Most modern boilers are shite and have the life expectancy of a butterfly.

The problem with old boilers is they use more gas than modern condensing boilers and parts tend to be difficult to source.
They always tend to break down at the coldest time of the year. But other than that they tend to last longer than modern equivalent models.

Keep your old boiler and buy up some critical spares such as gas valve, flame failure device, thermocouple etc so you have them by you. You will then be in a much stronger position if one of these components goes - even if you call out British Gas (heaven forbid but they are often one of the quickest for call outs) they can't make their usual lying song and dance about parts being obsolete if you have the parts right there for them to fit.