rayburn "living with"

[Schoolmarm]

I have seen a multifuel Rayburn on ebay and made an offer. He has counter offered so it is now available to me for a short period for £2,250.00. It comes with new insulated stainless steel flue, approx 5 meters. The flue has only been used for one season.
Looking at other similar models on ebay this is quite a good price.

I currently have a very large oil boiler, electric cooker and cast iron stove thing (small) in the living room.

The blurb says it will provide hot water, central heating and cooking. It can use wood or coal. It doesn't seem to get as hot with wood and I am wondering if it will be capable of providing everything we need. I don't want to use coal.

Or do I need to keep my oil boiler and link it all together and just use oil to supplement it?

How do people cope with feeding it all the time to keep the house warm and cook? It seems to need planning for cooking as you divert the heat but does this mean that the heating goes off whilst cooking?

Finally how do I manage to cook in summer? I have an immersion heater for the water, would I have to keep the electric cooker too? Really confused.

 

[skier-hughes]

Check the rayburn web site with the model number and it'll give you all the details you need if you search for the manual. I did for our old 1970's one.
Which told me it wouldn't heat the house - it didn't.
We have a microwave/grill/oven combi unit for summer cooking, along with induction hobs.
We also used to use immersion, but now have solar for summer hot water.

 

[Schoolmarm]

Is your giant burner thing running your rads then? And what are you cooking on?

 

[Schoolmarm]

It is one of these;
http://www.rayburn-web.co.uk/what-is-a-rayburn/rayburn-models/rayburn-heatranger/cooking,-domestic-hot-water--central-heating/solid-fuel--wood/heatranger-355sfw.aspx


We have one more rad than it says it will heat. That is why I wondered if you can keep the oil boiler and share the work. :?

Well 3 more rads but I suppose the two in the kitchen can be removed.

 

[Ixia]

Argh, accidently clicked on the preview post to edit and it deleted my whole post

We lived with a solid fuel Rayburn No 3 (1950s) for the first 6yrs of our marriage, we cooked on it, it heated our water and was pretty much the only source of heat (apart from a coal fire and 2 useless storage heaters). We burnt logs and some sort of solid fuel, can't remember what type - it came in big lumps and was v. mucky. The logs would burn hot, but didn't last as long as the coal, so we used logs when we were in and coal at night.

We had a combi grill microwave, but unless your house is freezing in summer you really need an additional way of cooking. I have seen ( In those posh mags) that people sometimes have a domino hob (small 2 ring hob) and a combi micro/oven. You can also get portable one ring induction hobs, that could be put away for the winter. No idea what they are like to use though.

I wouldn't go back to a Rayburn if you paid me. Fond memories of having to run hot water off in the middle of the night as it would over heat and boil in the tank - though I think this was because it was an ancient model that leaked air (my Dad rescued it from a farmers back yard) and ran too hot. We were working away for 12/14 hrs a day and would come home starving and knackered only to find we'd have to nurse the Rayburn back to life before we could even think about dinner. Although it had some advantages, nothing beats a Rayburn roast (the oven wasn't the easiest of sizes though), you can dry all your washing and best of all the oven didn't need cleaning, just an occasional rub with a wire brush and a sweep out.

 

[Schoolmarm]

I wouldn't go back to a Rayburn if you paid me.

:lol: :lol: Am now doubting the wisdom of it.

 

[JoceAndChris]

I'm no expert with this but I couldn't manage without an electric oven - neither summer or winter. I can't plan ahead with meals, and will typically want a hot oven straight away - or at least within ten minutes. From its usual ambient temperature it takes around 40 minutes to get hot. Also, I find my Rayburn won't give me 8 hot radiators ( we only have 8 rads - brrr!) and an oven that can cook roast potatoes - if it's freezing and the rads are on it never climbs to roast potato temperature, but that might be because it's very old.( it's an oil powered one as well). It's fantastic for old cuts of meat that need slow cooking on a low heat for 8 hours, but that isn't typically what we eat. How that measures against the new ones that burn wood I don't know, but I'd imagine significant improvements have been made.

Cooking is a precision art, lots of dishes need a sudden high heat at the end for crisping and my Rayburn was never up to it though.

Abi has a new wood fired Esse and would be able to tell you about what it's like constantly feeding it, perhaps?


My house is so cold the ambient warmth of the Rayburn ( heating the water) is very welcome in the summer. And in the winter, it really is lovely to know that that room, at least, is always warm.

 

[skier-hughes]

We had a combi grill microwave, but unless your house is freezing in summer you really need an additional way of cooking. I have seen ( In those posh mags) that people sometimes have a domino hob (small 2 ring hob) and a combi micro/oven. You can also get portable one ring induction hobs, that could be put away for the winter. No idea what they are like to use though.

I wouldn't go back to a Rayburn if you paid me.

Whereas the above is us, we've lived for a few years with a portable induction hob and microwave combi, we now have a buiult in domino 2 ring induction hob and microwave combi. Next week I'm turing the rayburn back on and I absolutely love it, the way it cooks is so different to convential means and with a little though you soon get used to how you need to cook and I wouldn't be without it now. I'm not sure about constantly feeding one, ours is oil, it's enough to keep feeding the fire with back boiler.

I'm not sure about havign two forms of water heating, you'd need some sort of valve system and failsafes, does the oil boiler turn itself on and off if the water reaches it's temp?

 

[Tom]

I wouldn't go back to a Rayburn if you paid me.

I gather you mean a solid fuel Rayburn? I absolutely love my gas Rayburn.

A word of warning. Modern Rayburns just don't have the build quality of older ones. My friend had an early 80's one and loved it. She moved house and bought a new one. She hated it. The main oven door broke 3 times, the thermostat packed in twice and the buner packed in....all in 12 months! She's now got another secondhand 80's one and loves it. The guy who services mine says they have more call outs to new ones than older ones, too. Fortunately, mine's an 80's one

 

[Schoolmarm]

Joce, so is yours using oil to just heat the water and keep that area warm? Or is it your only boiler for the rads?


Graham, the oil boiler we have now is on a timer and radiator stats so it will come on and off as water or rooms reach temp required.

I wanted to be green and less dependent on electric and oil.

I also wanted more heat for longer.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Our oil fired Rayburn is used for heating the hot water, the rads, and for making that breakfast room warm. ( there's another way to get hot water - the 40s back boiler in the music room -but you need 12 hours of roaring fire to get a bath!)

If you aren't worried about getting the oven really hot really quickly then it's a great device. There are rarely problems with sufficiency of hot water - we have it on a timer coming on for around 4-5 hours a day in winter, less in summer.

Expensive though - we spend about £1500 a year on oil, and then perhaps a bit less on electricity. ( lights, electric heaters, oven) I can see why you'd want to get away from oil.

 

[worms]

Schoolmarm, do you have the space to install a big thermal store tank and feed both the existing boiler and the new Rayburn into it? That way you could make the most of both/either of the heat sources as time, season and fuel dictate.

I wouldn't want to do without my Rayburn and have no alternative cooking system, apart from the microwave.

 

[Schoolmarm]

How close does the thermal store need to be?

I wonder if I should be looking at a totally different make and model.

Joce how many radiators will it run?

 

[JoceAndChris]

It's happily running 8 rads and Chris thinks it would run more, though that's hard to say without going through all the literature.

Did you find anything useful on the Rayburn website? Have you tried ringing up heating engineers or stockists?

When I whined to my Rayburn service man that it won't give me 8 hot rads and 220 degrees of heat in the oven at the same time in the winter he said no, of course it won't - I was asking too much!

 

[worms]

How close does the thermal store need to be?

I've no direct experience of this but have been led to believe that such an arrangement would work for me with the Rayburn in the kitchen and a thermal store and wood-fired boiler in the garage 13 metres away.

I guess that, even with good insulation, the further away the heatstore is, the greater the heat loss is and also the more electricity that would be used to pump it all. There must be a distance beyond which it is not practical and I would imagine that this also relates to the input and output temperature. But the beauty of the system is that you can then feed in heat from any source or combination of sources and also, if you want, have the hot water on mains pressure heated through a manifold.

 

[Schoolmarm]

So really I need to plan the position of a thermal store before buying anything.

Joce, 8 rads is the maximum it will do according to the website. When I requested any rayburn to do 9 rads all of them went off screen.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Thanks - that explains why there are only 8 rads then, and the house is cold.

Good luck with your purchase, it's all so complicated!

 

[Schoolmarm]

lol!!

Oil might do more if it is modern! I was looking for multifuel.

 

[Tom]

I'm not sure how they define 8 rads. Surely, it depends on the size of them? A boiler that's struggling to heat 8 massive rads would surely be able to cope with little effort to heat 8 small ones? Likewise, newer ones will heat better than older, furred up ones.

My gas Rayburn is rated at 58,000 btus with the boiler burner 'ON' and the oven on tickover (lowest setting). That's managing to do all the UFH downstairs and 6 rads upstairs (of varying sizes), plus one in the bathroom which is also the heat sink.

Schoolmarm, I think you need to look more at the BTU output and requirements, more than just a set number of rads.

 

[Schoolmarm]

There is info on both btus and radiator surface area square footage but it still looks underpowered as all our rads are quite big.

I am notgoing to take him up on the counter offer and do some proper r and d.