In the Victorian terraces the job is usually about the flue and the chimney breast. These houses were built around a fire, and the chimney breast is still there in most of them — sometimes with a decommissioned back boiler behind it, sometimes with a liner from a previous install, sometimes with nothing but a lot of soot. Flue routing in a mid-terrace is constrained: you cannot discharge over a boundary, you have to keep the required distances from openings and the neighbour's windows, and on a narrow terrace those circles overlap more than you would like.
In the town centre apartments the constraint is the building rather than the flat. Shared risers, a communal flue arrangement in some blocks, and a freeholder who has opinions. What is technically possible and what is contractually allowed are different questions in a flat, and the second one is the one that stops jobs.
Out on the Bowdon fringe it is the villas, and there the question is not which combi. It is whether a combi should be there at all. A lot of these houses have had one fitted because it was cheap and quick, and they have been disappointing ever since — because a big house with several bathrooms needs stored hot water, not a heat exchanger trying to make it on demand for four outlets at once.
Whatever the house: Trafford water runs around 30 mg/l, which is soft. You do not need a scale reducer and you do not need a softener. If a quote for an Altrincham boiler has one on it, ask what it is for.
