Gas safety week 2011

September 12th sees the launch of the first ever Gas Safety Week run by Gas Safe Register. The aim of the week is to raise awareness of gas safety in the home.Gas Safety Week aims to raise awareness of gas safety and the importance of taking care of your gas appliances.
Badly fitted and poorly serviced gas appliances can cause gas leaks, fires, explosions and carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide is a highly poisonous gas. You can’t see it, taste it or smell it, but it can kill quickly with no warning.

By taking care of your gas appliances properly you are taking care of your home and your loved ones. Follow these top tips to help keep you and your family gas safe:

• make sure only a Gas Safe registered engineer works on your gas appliances
• make sure gas appliances have a regular service and an annual gas safety check,
• always check the engineer's Gas Safe Register ID card

As part of Gas Safety Week we’re going around the country raising awareness of gas safety and giving out essential advice to help people keep safe in their homes. Many people buy gas appliances but we want to remind them that only a Gas Safe registered engineer should fit their appliance. We’re working with major gas appliance retailers B&Q and Comet to help raise awareness of gas safety and during Gas Safety Week we’ve got events taking place in some of their stores across the country. If you’re in the area why not pop by and see us:

Date	Location
14th September 10am - 2pm	Coatbridge, ML5 4AN (B&Q) Erdington, B35 7RD (B&Q) Sutton, SM1 4RQ (B&Q) Swansea, SA1 7DF (B&Q)) Isle of Man, IM2 2QT (B&Q)
15th September 10am - 2pm	Dundee, DD2 3PT (B&Q) Meir Park, ST3 7QA (B&Q) Plymouth, PL7 4TB (Comet) Tottenham Vale, N15 4QD (Comet)
16th September 10am - 2pm	Trafford Park, M41 7LG (B&Q) Enfield, EN1 1TH (Comet) Rotherham, S60 1TG (Comet)
17th September 10am - 2pm	Durham, DH1 2HT (B&Q) Grimsby, DN32 9AW (B&Q) Gillingham, ME8 6BY (B&Q) Cribbs Causeway, BS10 7TX (B&Q) Kirkcaldy, KY2 6QL (Comet)
18th September 10am - 2pm	Bolton, BL1 2SL (B&Q) Swindon, SN2 2DJ (B&Q)

Gas Safety Week will see national advertising and promotions across the whole country with organisations both small and large getting involved. If you or an organisation you work for would like to get involved there are plenty or ways to support Gas Safety Week. No matter how big or small your organisation we would love you to pledge your support of Gas Safety Week. We have created various tools for you to use to support the week and to help get the Gas Safe message out ther

Heating a house with a wood burning boiler stove is an increasingly popular option in the UK

With Scottish Power putting their prices up and with the other big suppliers certain to follow. More and more people are turn ing back the clock, more and more people are returning to burning wood. Firewood is a secure and relatively cheap form of fuel and a wood burning stove provides a cosy focal point to any room. A back boiler wood burner stove gives your family plenty of hot water, as well as running a complete central heating system and by heating your home by burning wood as fuel, you are reducing your CO2 emissions.

A wood boiler stove is an appliance that can burn wood to create hot water. Some take the form of what you would recognise as a traditional wood burner whilst others look and work much more like a gas boiler.

There are various types and permutations of boiler for wood stoves available but they all do the same job - they transfer heat from the burning wood into water, which can then be piped where it is needed and used for heating or domestic hot water. In a traditional wood boiler stove the boiler is usually a simple metal box filled with water and with 2 or 4 tappings to allow you to attach your water pipes to it. These tappings are usually 1" BSP fittings. Usually these boilers replace the fire-bricks inside the firebox of the stove and are known as back boilers because the bulk of the boiler is at the back of the firebox.

Wood boiler stove heat output to water

Wood boiler stoves can come with a variety of rated boiler outputs from around 5,000 BTU to 90,000 BTU. Make sure to check whether the rated output is the maximum or nominal. The nominal output is the output at which the stove would normally be run and is of course lower than the maximum output. You would not drive a car at it's full speed all the time and a wood boiler stove is just the same. Also when sizing the boiler stove for your needs remember that you need to use the nominal heat output.

Central heating and hot water from a wood boiler stove

A boiler stove can be used to power your central heating system and to provide hot water as well. Designing such a heating and hot water system is relatively simple but you will need the help and advice of an experienced heating engineer.

Wood fired central heating

Here the wood boiler stove is connected to the house heating system, commonly radiators, and the heat from the burning wood is pumped around the house. If your house uses underfloor heating then you would connect your boiler stove to a hot water tank and then the underfloor heating would be connected to that.

Heating hot water with a wood burning boiler stove

One of the differences between a boiler stove and a conventional gas/oil boiler is that it takes time for the hot water coming from the stove boiler to get up to temperature. This means that you cannot simply take hot water directly from the stove boiler: you need to connect the boiler stove to a hot water tank. The water in the tank is heated by the stove and stored up for use when needed.

Unvented system

In an unvented system there is no header tank and the water in the pipes is under pressure. Modern heating systems run by gas boilers tend to be unvented (or pressurised). One give-away is that there is often a pressure gauge on the boiler measured in 'Bar'. When the water in a pressurised system expands the pressure in the system increases. Most stoves are not suitable to be directly linked up to a pressurised system because with a stove it is possible to boil the water in the boiler. However a vast majority of stoves supplied by authorised dealers can be linked directly to pressurised systems with the incorporation of an expansion vessel - which expands to cope with pressure increases, a pressure release valve, and a heat dump system with additional safety features.

Renewable Home Heating - Solar Panels

Given today’s concerns about global warming and climate change, a growing number of us are looking to use renewable energy to reduce our carbon footprint and, when it comes to providing domestic heating and hot water solutions which satisfy these demands it can be quite confusing.

If you’d like to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that you depend on to heat the water in your home and, at the same time, significantly lower your carbon dioxide emissions, why not consider installing a solar water heating system? Solar water heating systems work by absorbing solar energy. The energy is transferred from the solar panel to heat the water in your hot water cylinder. Highly efficient, completely controllable and low maintenance, a solar water heating system is easiest to install if you already have a conventional ‘system’ or ‘regular’ boiler
and could provide up to 60%* of your annual hot water from a clean, renewable source of energy. Works come rain or shine, So ideal for the British Weather!Solar water heating panels do not rely on high temperatures or even direct sunlight to work. Even on cloudy days, they can deliver significant energy savings. That's because they work on the principle of light absorption, rather than needing heat or direct sunlight.
Unless your home is a listed building or in a conservation area, planning permission for solar water heating panels is unlikely to be required. However it is always best to check with your local planning office. For renewables planning guidance visit www.energysavingtrust.org.uk