Our home is off grid and we use a mix of Oil (main house), Wood (stove in lounge), LPG (hob in kitchen and boiler in garage) and Electric (Aga and heat pump)
We have an old baxi LPG boiler in our garage which is fed by a bank of 4x47kg LPG bottles. The boiler is used to heat an office space above and a shower and sink in the office space.
With Covid I have been using this space a lot more, however the old boiler is not great and when I tried to get it serviced I was informed it was probably about time to replace.
I contacted a few local people who deal with LPG and was already aware that the old boiler would need to be replaced with a condensing model. One of the installers was talking about fitting a macerator type pump which would need to pump the waste at least 1.5 meters vertically and then 5 meters horizontally to connect with the waste stack - this seemed dodgy to me and I wasn't sure it would actually work well in practice and has more parts to go wrong.
The other installer who I chose said a soakaway would be needed. He should be able to do the work on 16th or 20th depending on parts but has requested I break up the concrete and dig the hole, which is why I'm on here for some advice since I would like to start the work this weekend. He said this should be 500mm from the foundations, is this the minimum distance or the maximum or a general guide ? The reason I ask is I often keep a pallet on this outside wall with a large stack of logs upto 1.6 meters high which I'm seasoning. If it's 500mm when the work is done can I concrete over everything and put the pallet back to continue drying my logs ? I gather that the limestone chips might need to topped up or replaced ? So does this mean that I would have an circle about 1 foot in circumference of limestone chips on the surface ? If thats the case I would like to place the soakaway about 1.5 metres from the wall so I can still be a cheapskate and season my logs would this be a problem ?
We have an old baxi LPG boiler in our garage which is fed by a bank of 4x47kg LPG bottles. The boiler is used to heat an office space above and a shower and sink in the office space.
With Covid I have been using this space a lot more, however the old boiler is not great and when I tried to get it serviced I was informed it was probably about time to replace.
I contacted a few local people who deal with LPG and was already aware that the old boiler would need to be replaced with a condensing model. One of the installers was talking about fitting a macerator type pump which would need to pump the waste at least 1.5 meters vertically and then 5 meters horizontally to connect with the waste stack - this seemed dodgy to me and I wasn't sure it would actually work well in practice and has more parts to go wrong.
The other installer who I chose said a soakaway would be needed. He should be able to do the work on 16th or 20th depending on parts but has requested I break up the concrete and dig the hole, which is why I'm on here for some advice since I would like to start the work this weekend. He said this should be 500mm from the foundations, is this the minimum distance or the maximum or a general guide ? The reason I ask is I often keep a pallet on this outside wall with a large stack of logs upto 1.6 meters high which I'm seasoning. If it's 500mm when the work is done can I concrete over everything and put the pallet back to continue drying my logs ? I gather that the limestone chips might need to topped up or replaced ? So does this mean that I would have an circle about 1 foot in circumference of limestone chips on the surface ? If thats the case I would like to place the soakaway about 1.5 metres from the wall so I can still be a cheapskate and season my logs would this be a problem ?
