Commercial Boiler Installation – Penwortham Methodist Church

Initial Challenge & Location

Penwortham Methodist Church faced the problem that although they needed to heat the church in order to protect the fabric of the building and make it a comfortable place to congregate the prohibitive costs of doing so meant that they couldn’t.

The Approach to the Project

So, working together they raised what they thought would be sufficient funds. Unfortunately, when they approached potential suppliers, they found they were short of funds. Undeterred they approached GOS Heating who are known throughout the North West as great problem solvers when it comes to anything heating and plumbing related.

How it was designed

GOS sat down with the Church and through some clever thinking were able to design a solution that met the budget, met the regulations and designed in flexibility to allow different parts of the church to be heated independently. This means that evening activities that may only require one room to be heated could be made comfortable without heating the rest of the building.

The Solution

The solution was to remove the old boiler from the cellar but install two new domestic sized boilers cascaded together in a room which was adjacent to an outside wall. This meant that the length of the flues could be kept short. By using the higher end domestic boilers in tandem kept the equipment costs down.

The radiators and pipework in the church were cast iron which meant that they couldn’t be pressurised as you would in a new system and so again innovative thinking had to be used to overcome the problem.

The solution meant that a plate heat  exchanger was installed which effectively means that the water going round the boiler could be separated from the water going round the radiators. This meant the pressure was kept the same in the radiators and so not inducing leaks in an old system whilst a modern and efficient closed loop system could be built for the new boilers and upgraded plant room.

With careful thought and planning the connections with the radiators for the various areas of the church could be put in to zones so that temperature & time in each area could be controlled separately.

Benefits of the System

The benefit of careful thought and planning means that the Church can now afford to heat the church and so protect the fabric of the building and improve the comfort of the congregation. With the ability to heat parts of the church, the congregation can make better use of the building for events with smaller groups of people and so help encourage more people to engage with the church and its activities.