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No more gas boilers? You must be joking!

Former Community Member
Former Community Member

The media seems to be awash today with the announcement that the government HOPE to have no more new gas boilers sold after 2035. The devil of course is in the details….

At the moment I am working on a project at the HQ of a local parts supplier to do away with the existing (quite new) gas boilers and convert the place to VRV AC system. The existing gas loading is about 900kW so if I stick in a VRV system drawing about 300kW that should do. This would add about 400A per phase. Assume every other office block on the estate decides to ‘go green’ and do the same and straight away you are looking at some serious deficiencies in the local power infrastructure. Add in charging electric cars (we already have issues trying to charge 7 electric cars at 4 charge points in this office) and the potential for thousands of homes to all be heated by electric and I foresee a looming catastrophe.

Of course, the obvious solution is to upgrade the local and national grids to futureproof them and bring online more generating capacity but do you see any new power stations being built (apart from Hinkley)? Any new power lines/substations appearing? Or are we going to swap gas heating for electric heating run from gas generation? And what about the existing nuclear stations reaching the end of their lives? Discuss….

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    Certainly the hydrogen blending is being tried, and seems to work well, though it is very much at the experimental learning stage, so not ready for part of the bigger plan. 

    At low pressure H2 is not so bad - here  in the days of coal gas we had about 50% hydrogen and a far more laid back approach to thin wall lead pipes, string and pitch seals on threaded joints, and there were not many accidents, more carbon monoxide poisoning than explosions actually, although CO was only 10-20% of the mix. We'd need to add a stinking agent as we do to methane, and perhaps something to make the flames visible. Domestic gas supply in the UK is at  a pressure that struggles to blow bubbles in a milk shake - 20mbar is about 8 inches of water.

    Oddly I had cause to remove a dead length of former gas pipe from my house some years back, and as I unscrewed the joints I was greeted by the “town gas smell” I only recognised from childhood. Presumably prior to about 1970 the coal gas had diffused into the thread seals and became trapped, and the next 40 odd years of use with methane did nothing to shift it.

    The next 40-50 years will see change again, but we will only see the beginning of course.

    Mike

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  • 0

    Certainly the hydrogen blending is being tried, and seems to work well, though it is very much at the experimental learning stage, so not ready for part of the bigger plan. 

    At low pressure H2 is not so bad - here  in the days of coal gas we had about 50% hydrogen and a far more laid back approach to thin wall lead pipes, string and pitch seals on threaded joints, and there were not many accidents, more carbon monoxide poisoning than explosions actually, although CO was only 10-20% of the mix. We'd need to add a stinking agent as we do to methane, and perhaps something to make the flames visible. Domestic gas supply in the UK is at  a pressure that struggles to blow bubbles in a milk shake - 20mbar is about 8 inches of water.

    Oddly I had cause to remove a dead length of former gas pipe from my house some years back, and as I unscrewed the joints I was greeted by the “town gas smell” I only recognised from childhood. Presumably prior to about 1970 the coal gas had diffused into the thread seals and became trapped, and the next 40 odd years of use with methane did nothing to shift it.

    The next 40-50 years will see change again, but we will only see the beginning of course.

    Mike

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