[249bay]

I just had new equipment installed in my home hoping for better efficiency.
I had a burnham alpine gas boiler NG installed with an outdoor reset opperating at 95% eff
Also had a bosch gwh715es tankless for the hw operating on ng
I was awaiting the new bill from the gas company hoping to see a marked improvement on my consumption only to find that my bill was higher than it had been in the 4 years prior to getting the new system
My old system was the original gas system that was installed when the house was new in 55
Old system was a boiler with a separate hot water heater
The plumber that installed the new system seemed to have trouble when he was installing the new setup and will not return my calls
We have heat and hot water and everything seems to work fine with the exception of the outrageous bills
What can I do or look for? Do I have a leak? I'm puzzled

[mygirlsdad77]

Any chance gas prices have jumped signaficantly in your area? Or is the temp in your area colder than normal? If not, I would keep calling installer and have him check operation of both systems. By rights, you should be experiencing better efficiency with the upgrades you had done. Do you have floor heat? If so, boiler most likely ran for a long period on start up, causing gas usage to increase. If installer won't call you back, just keep calling, and maybe by the time he returns your call, you will have noticed that next months bill is much lower. Just some thoughts. Please let me know what you find. Take care.

[hvac1000]

Depending upon the type of system you have the new high efficiency boilers will not save much energy usage. It is one of the industrys best kept secrets. Post bach with the type of system you have. Fan coil,baseboard,cast iron or?

[249bay]

It's a condensing direct vent gas hot water boiler
I have fin type base board in basement and cast iron baseboard on the first floor
Thanks for your help

[hvac1000]

I can make this long or short but tonight is a short night.

In order to get maximum efficiency out of many of the new style boilers the water temperature must be kept down to below 125 degrees with 60 being somewhat ideal.

The reason for this is that the new style boilers condense which means that it gets more heat out of the fuel by causing the burner to tap or condense the normally unused heat that goes to the outside on older style units. This is great but in order for it to do its job the water temps need to be a lot lower than on the old style system.

For more of that kind of info see this link

Condensing boiler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Now to the heart of the issue. Most older homes are designed with enough baseboard radiation or other type of radiation to satisfy the heat requirements using 180 degree water. The older boiler did this well and the heat was just great. The return water temperatures were high like 150 degrees.Now comes the new style condensing boilers that like a 60 to 125 degree OR less water return temperature. In order to maintain the heat in the home the new boiler is setup or depending upon the type of controls to maintain a higher temperature than the new boiler likes. The new boiler will not condense with higher water temperatures and thus the extra heat extraction you paid for with the new boiler is not realised. Then you wonder why your utility usage is still high.

Efficiency curves point to the reason why a condensing boiler is not appropriate for systems with a return water temperature above 125°. The high efficiency of the condensing boiler would not be realized at the higher return water temperatures, and the larger investment would not be justified. NOTE: The lower the return water temperature the more efficient the new condensing boiler will be.

I am going to direct you to a article by Carol Fey. She worked for Honeywell for years and I keep this link for people such as yourself. With the problems you said your plumber had durning the install and with the BOAT LOAD of electronics that Alpine has it could also not be adjusted correctly for your system. For your unit you almost need a HVAC professional control person to set it up. (NO kidding). The manual for that boiler is 11.9 megs long so it is way to large to post here and that is no homeowner friendly advise in it to start with. It is designed for the heating professional only so I did not include a link.

Here is the link to one of Carols articles she wrote for Contractor Magazine. It explains the situation very well and most homeowners can understand the important parts. Quite a few years ago I did two articles for Contractor that were published but it had nothing to do with the new style boilers. It is probably one of the better mags for the trade.

http://contractormag.com/heating_con...ic_condensing/

Feel free to ask any further questions but since I am here and your unit is there I do not feel I can be of much further assistance except to say you might look around for another contractor with proven experience on the Alpine to do a check out of your unit. I am sure you will have to pay for this BUT the check out will insure you are getting as much efficiency as possible out of your new equipment.