Hamworthy Heating’s Purewell VariHeat boilers were the natural choice to enable a seamless heating upgrade at the Menzies Bournemouth Carlton Hotel, a four star hotel on the east cliff of Bournemouth.
Cedar Green Projects Ltd installed seven Purewell VariHeat 180kW condensing boilers in place of the existing sixteen Purewell Classic 70kW atmospheric boilers. The new boilers plus five remaining calorifiers provide the space heating and hot water for the entire seventy six bedroom hotel and adjoining timeshare apartments, including a leisure club with indoor pool and spa and outdoor swimming pool.
Danny Bulch, Director at Cedar Green Projects Ltd commented, “We pride ourselves on giving customers continuity of their heating and hot water systems throughout refurbishment projects. It is vital for commercial premises such as hotels and hospitals to have no system downtime due to the services being critical to their business. With the number of boilers reducing from two rows to just one, we could keep a row of old boilers running whilst we installed the new equipment alongside.”
The Purewell VariHeat boilers are commonly used in refurbishment projects as they fit on the same footprint as old atmospheric boilers, and can easily be connected to existing pipework and make use of existing flue runs to speed up installation.
Midtherm, Hamworthy’s flue partner, installed the new flue and lined the existing chimney to enable it to cope with a system that produces condensate.
With older plant rooms access can inevitably be one of the main issues. The stairs to the Carlton Hotel’s basement plant room are fairly steep and required the use of a crane to lift out the old boilers and install the new ones. Purewell VariHeat boilers can also be supplied for site assembly when access is problematic.
Danny went on to say, “It’s always a pleasure to work with Hamworthy and their staff through the entire process from sales and technical assistance to despatch and commissioning. I only ever install Hamworthy boilers; they are easy to fit and reliable. The Carlton Hotel has seen their system upgraded from the early Hamworthy UR boilers through to the Purewell VariHeat boilers of today. The upgrades have been straightforward due to the ease of replacement between old atmospheric and newer condensing models in Hamworthy’s range. The newer models also provide benefits to the hotel of better efficiencies and lower service and maintenance costs, since the number of boilers have more than halved.”

For enhanced control of the multiple boiler system a Merley sequence controller was installed as well as an external air sensor to allow for weather compensation.
The Purewell VariHeat boiler’s cast iron heat exchanger is complemented by an integral secondary condensing heat exchanger to provide exceptional seasonal efficiencies up to 108% net. The boiler range consists of 5 condensing models with outputs from 70kW to 180kW, and 4 non-condensing, high efficiency models, 65kW to 125kW.

Find out more about the evolution of cast iron boilers from Hamworthy.