Need boiler, any suggestions?

Bearcamp

Have a 2 story home with 2 zone valves and it's hot water baseboard heat along with my hot water. Home was built in 1880. The boiler is about 25 years old and works okay but sucks up the oil and has some rust issues. Leak here and there. I'm thinking about replacing it with a new one. In fact I got an estimate of around 4000.00 if I went with an electric hot water heater.That would be a 10 year warranty. Any ideas whether I should go with the electric hot water heater or what are some other routes I can go with? He suggeated I had the electric plumbed into the new furnace and no running the oil in warmer weather. Also suggested some aqua stat the reads off the outside temp. Didn't understand that part. Again,,,,any other ideas? What suggestions do you people have? I do want the most effiescent way to go if possible.

jogr

I understand the most efficient boilers to be Natural Gas ModCon boilers. If you don't have natural gass available you'll need to run the numbers on electric vs oil vs lp and guess what the price of each will be over the life of the unit.

tk03

I am assuming you also want to save fuel. You got a price of $4000.00. How did he size the boiler? The savings is maximized by a heat loss calculation. The amount of radiation in the home has NOTHING to do with sizing a hot water boiler.
I would use an indirect hot water tank for domestic water use.
The outdoor reset control is a great feature. It changes the water temperature in the heating system to match the heat loss of the home as outside temperature changes. You can also find outside design temperature info there and other info.
For more info on outdoor reset controls see the link below.
http://www.comfort-calc.net/Outdoor_Reset_Info.html

scowl

Indirect hot water tanks were described in a recent Fine Homebuilding, but I just can't get the numbers to work in my favor to justify going that route. The indirect tank would cost over a thousand bucks to replace a hot water heater that cost hundreds. The indirect tank may last twice as long and might be a few percent more efficient.

If we used lots of hot water or I owned a duplex, I could justify it by the amount of hot water an indirect tank would produce, but the 40 gallon tank is enough for us.