Product preferences

John F. Cizmar

What are the groups impressions of the following brands of equipment and components: Rehau tubing and accessories,
Wirsbo tubing and accessories, Munchkin boilers, Hydrotherm boilers, Nix controls and
Tekmar controls.
I would like to hear from those who actually have used or supplied these products rather than someone with a financial stake in the selection process.
John F. Cizmar

Al Letellier

preferences

Our experience with these products is limited to Wirsbo,Hydrotherm and Tekmar. We use a lot of Wirsbo products with much success and my only complaint is the manifold brackets. Tough to keep straight and it doesn't take much to break them. I understand they have a new one coming out soon......Experience with Hydrotherm is limited as we don't see too many here in Maine. Have taken out a lot of Celtic boilers due to parts availability problems, but otherwise OK results. Tekmar is fantastic!!! Use a lot of their products with excellent results. Great tech support and a great bunch of guys at FIA....Hope this was of help.

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Boilerpro_3

Impressions

Rehau, have only used thier tubing. I really appreciate they mark their tubing with how many feet are left on the roll. Wirsbo, also good tubing, never have liked thier gasketed manifold, so I am starting to make my own out of copper. Propex fitting system is great, again no gaskets or compression components. Have used some Hydrotherm, appears to have once been a good company, but thier boilers now appear to be cheaply designed and built, and are not holding up well. I believe the Pulse condensing boiler is a great design, with a large water content to prevent short cycling, that doesn't need to rely on complex controls for operation and safety but if poorly built could be problematic (early attempts were problematic). Use Tekmar controls exclusively for system controls. Well built and reliable and excellent factory and local support. However, the manuals have become less than stellar with the organization of the vast amount of information needed for these controls. Information regarding particular functions is no longer placed in one location, and some information is just left out. Also, with the introduction of some of thier new boiler staging controls, which are great but cannot be integrated with zone controls, they are dropping controls with these capabilities, leaving some gaping holes in thier product line.

Boilerpro