As part of a hotel conversion project in Eastbourne, East Sussex Home Glow Plumbing & Heating has installed a mixture of Alpha InTec C combination boilers and FlowSmart systems.
The new development, previously known as the Lathom Hotel, is located close to the Eastbourne seafront and consists of 15 luxury apartments and separate townhouse. The space inside the building has been reconfigured to turn the 81-bedroom hotel into large residential apartments.
Due to the size of the new apartments and a need for energy efficiency, a high capacity combination boiler was required. The Alpha InTec 34C was selected and installed in 13 of the new homes to ensure the heating and hot water demands could be easily met.
In addition, Home Glow Plumbing & Heating also specified Alpha’s FlowSmart for the townhouse and the two largest apartments where demands on the hot water system from multiple outlets needed to be factored in. FlowSmart was selected as a more energy efficient alternative to the conventional system boiler and unvented cylinder.
FlowSmart features a GasSaver flue gas heat recovery unit and thermal store to enable a combination boiler to meet the higher levels of demand and achieve a sustained flow rate of up to 18 litres per minute above 50°C – easily surpassing the performance of a 200 litre unvented cylinder. The system works by pre-heating incoming mains water using heat reclaimed from boiler flue gases. It then passes through the thermal store’s copper coil heat exchanger where it is heated further by the surrounding hot water from the primary system. The water then passes through a blending valve, where it is controlled to an optimum 30ºC before entering the boiler. This also lowers the boiler’s workload significantly and provides up to a 25% gas saving when compared with a conventional boiler and hot water cylinder.
For the townhouse, the wall mounted FlowSmart variant was chosen, which combines the InTec 40GS Plus boiler with integrated GasSaver and a bolt-on cylinder. However, due to space restrictions around the boiler in the apartments, the original configuration of FlowSmart was selected, which uses a freestanding thermal store sited beneath the boiler.
Billy Poole, owner of Home Glow Plumbing & Heating explained; “For this development we needed boilers that could meet the heating and hot water demands for each apartment while still achieving the best possible energy efficiency and use of the available space. The Alpha products, especially the FlowSmart systems ticked all the boxes.”