Best option for hot water tank All aspects of plumbing questions and answers, help, tips and information

[bart]

New house, blank canvas. V old house with only an immersion tank for water heating and night storage heaters for general heating. i have a chance to start from scratch and intend to be as energy efficient as possible. i want to install solar water heating panels on my south facing roof and back up with oil/lpg gas boiler. Which is the best type of hot tank to go for? large indirect twin coil tank, or twin coil heat store. Or are the tanks basically the same?
there is also the central heating system to take into account, as i'm starting from scratch i will be installing a radiator system too. (house to old and un-efficiently insulated for under floor). so any suggestions pro's con's are most welcome.

[Perry525]

The first thing to do is go round the house and make all the doors and windows a tight fit, then go round again and make sure every hole of any size is blocked.
Ventilation is a very expensive luxury.
Then use one (or more) of the inter-net sites to ascertain how much heat they think each room will need.
Then look at the history of your location and see how cold it gets, worst case minimum temperature.
Then work out how much it will cost you to heat the place at current prices.

Now dump the existing system as too expensive.

Consider using gas central heating, its very popular over 20 million homes use it of choice of the UK total of over 26.7 million homes and of course more would use it if it was in their location.

The best system is skirting board heating, its expensive but, being all copper pipe it will never need replacing, being at the bottom of each wall, each wall becomes a heat store and the most comfortable rooms are ones where the wall temperature matches the air temperature.

With a normal radiator system there will always be a two foot wide zone alongside outside walls and below windows where it is not comfortable to sit on the coldest nights.