Humber Barge Waterdog
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The expensive stainless steel hot water tank burst after only 6 years use, even though it had a 25 year guarantee! However the guarantee covered the inner stainless steel tank whereas the supplier said that the outer steel shell was not covered and usually rusted through due to magnetite particles in the water! Ha! That’s useful!

So we replaced it with a conventional stainless tank with double calorifier. We read up on how to fit a mains pressure hot water tank and set to getting the old one out and re-plumbing for the new tank. It was quite a job and there were lots of details to get right

Here is the new tank being lifted into place in our modified airing cupboard. It is an insulated 120 litre stainless steel tank tested to 15 bar but came with a pressure reduced kit to give a maximum input pressure of 3 bar.

We could lift its 35Kg between us and it fitted nicely in the back of our cupboard.

We took days over designing how to plumb it in safely.

The plumbing of an indirectly heated tank is quite complicated and needed 2 expansion tanks to allow for expansion of water when heated. It also needed pressure relief valves and temperature relief valves with tundishes, a filling loop with non-return valve, thermostat to call for the boiler to fire and system drain points.

We plumbed it all in Hep2o and designed it so we would understand it in years to come. To our amazement it worked brilliantly and now gives bags of hot water on demand. We drew out the system and put it in the boats manual.

This is the 4th hot tank that we have had, we think that the variation in pressure of the secondary system due to the pressure system was too much for the first 2 copper tanks. We hope this tank will give longer service than the last 3.