In his exclusive column, Heating Engineer Andy Gibbs reminisces about some of the old models of boilers that he used to work on:
I’ve got my rose-tinted glasses on to write this, and this is my Uncle Albert’s “during the war” moment.
I’m talking here about legendary appliances, those that pretty much exist only in the memories of older installers now, and maybe the odd one left gathering dust in the corner of a training centre somewhere in Leeds or Exeter, or The Science Museum.
Of the original, early-floor standing boilers, the ones that come straight to mind are the Potterton Diplomat, the Ideal E Type, and the Vulcan Continental.
Then came the Potterton Kingfisher, The Glow-worm Hideaway, and Ideal Mexico. How many of you remember these?
If your wall was strong enough, and your installer was also strong enough, you could have one of these cast iron lumps on your wall as well, they certainly weren’t “cupboard fit”. I’m talking about the Ideal Concord and the Glow-Worm Spacesaver (massive misnomer there)
All had one thing in common, a massive lump of cast iron that got hot. And never went wrong.
They couldn’t go wrong. There was barely anything to go wrong, apart from a thermocouple and a gas valve. All of them, in their own strange way, were lovely, warming, reassuring, plodding away reliably doing their job.
Were they better than the current high-efficiency condensing boilers?
Yes.
And No.
They were definitely better because you only needed a new one every 40 years and you could fix them by hitting them with a hammer, but they were definitely worse because they were huge, inefficient, and more dangerous.
It wasn’t all plain sailing back then, there were some absolute rotters as well.
The New World CH502, the Thorn Olympic, and the dreaded Servowarm MasterRad.
If you’ve never seen, or heard of these wretched appliances, honestly, consider yourself very lucky indeed. To work on them was a thankless task.
The Servowarm was a boiler, hidden behind a radiator, normally fitted in a hallway that you had to swing the rad out and prop the end of it up on a few books or something, just so you could access the boiler.
What could possibly go wrong?
I once found a boiler operated by clockwork. Now this thing pre-dated even me by a lot of years. I’d heard of them but never seen one.
Essentially, you wound up the timer, and it ticked away until it hit an on point, whereby it would allow the gas to flow until it ticked around to an off point.
Safety didn’t really seem to matter!
I have no idea what would happen if the clockwork mechanism stopped while the gas was flowing. I capped it off, it was all I knew what to do with it.
We do really have it easy these days.
Boilers are light, easy to fit, can be fitted anywhere, versatile, efficient, I could go on. You’ll just never know how good you’ve got it!
