Established firm provides winter warmers for Cheshire church and Bedfordshire mansion

The installation of a new heating system was completed at St Oswald’s Parish Church in Brereton in February

The past few months have been a busy time for specialist heating contractors Mellor and Mottram. The Stoke-on-Trent firm paused only for the Christmas celebrations before pushing on to complete jobs in both the South and North West of England.

February saw the final touches put to a new system at St Oswald’s Parish Church in Brereton, Cheshire. An Anglican church in the diocese of Chester, St Oswald’s is Grade Two* listed and has been described as ‘an unusually complete late perpendicular church’.

The present church dates from around 1550, although there is known to have been a chapel on the site in the reign of Richard the Lionheart. The building’s listed status, together with a wealth of interior features – including stained glass by William Wailes – made the design and installation of the new system a particularly specialist enterprise.

The new system is an oil-fired wet system incorporating a 100kW balance flue condensing boiler and nine Dunham-Bush fan convector heaters. It replaces an old 60kW electric boiler that fed cast-iron radiators and had proven insufficient for modern needs.

The system is controlled by a state-of-the-art Heatmiser digital control unit featuring optimum start technology. That allows the system to ‘learn’ when the best time is to fire up the heating before a service.

Although Mellor and Mottram are known nationally for their specialist expertise in church heating systems, their long experience of dealing with listed buildings, coupled with their background in commercial heating, means they are also the natural choice for heating historic buildings outside the ecclesiastical sphere.

Such was the case when the company installed the new system at the famous Shuttleworth Mansion in Bedfordshire. Known as the home of aviation pioneer Richard Shuttleworth, after whom the famous Shuttleworth Collection of aircraft is named, the house itself dates from 1875 and is now also a conference and wedding venue as well as housing Shuttleworth College.

The sumptuous interior of the house is now cosseted in an appropriate ambient temperature following the installation of the new oil-fired system, which also incorporates a new hot-water facility and services the college as well as the house.

The heat for the wet system is provided by a Hoval Ultra Oil 250 condensing boiler. The existing flues were lined with ceramic liner to provide a mixture of heaters and radiators. The new hot water system comprises three A O Smith cylinders.

The entire system is fed by a 70,000 litre oil tank, which had to be craned into place over the top of the building.

Mellor and Mottram have been providing heating solutions for churches and listed buildings for more than four decades – in at least one case their reputation was passed on from one generation of clergy to the next. With over 600 installations behind them they can provide the most appropriate solution, whether that be traditional systems with efficient modern controls or renewable systems that help ‘Shrink the Footprint’.

The famous Shuttleworth Mansion in Bedfordshire has benefitted from a newly installed system by Mellor and Mottram

For further information visit www.mellorandmottram.com