Brivis Buffalo BX526 (350mm)

Brivis Bx 526 – Original one gave 20+ years service , new one 3 years old , worked first year , needed service tech $ 250 second year , this year needs a service tech again . Rubbish do not buy one .

All good! – Just thought - in case it helps anybody - I would offer up a review of this unit, as we've had ours in place for over 3 years now. We replaced a 30yr old original Buffalo type unit (that came with the house that we bought) with the BX526. Our setup is under-floor (concrete slab) fixed ducting to most of the house. I can't offer any comment on how the supposed 5-star rating of the BX526 compares to the original unit (which I daresay would've scored about 0 stars in today's ratings!) in terms of performance or running costs as our original unit was pretty much already knackered from when we inherited it.

All I can say is we've had the BX526 running through 3 Canberra winters now and it hasn't skipped a beat - and as you can probably guess it does need to run hard and long in our very cold conditions to maintain ideal temperature inside what is a fairly large house. I can't complain with regards to the performance or reliability of this unit; it's behaved just fine. Our installer at the time did recommend that we upgrade the size of the internal air intake, and that seemed sensible to me as the new model was, on paper, considerably more powerful than the original.

The one negative is the whole system does seem quite noisy/blowy when operating - from an air-flow "whooshing" point of view - but I think that has a lot more to do with the type of ducting/vents that we have. (In our last house the gas heating system was ducted through ceiling vents and seemed quite a bit quieter and calmer overall, so that's what I was used to.) It probably also doesn't help that our air intake grille is located right alongside our open-plan lounge/dining area. However, I have been able to play with the maximum fan speed of the system - I ended up throttling it back a bit and have gained a considerably more acceptable level of noise/whooshing, without any noticeable compromise in heating ability throughout. So I'm happy.

Of course, in the few years since we installed this unit, gas heating in general has rapidly fallen out of favour, but I think I would still recommend this unit to anybody with a similar setup to us. I still haven't come across any other practical or sensibly affordable way to get 30kW of heat into a large house in a cold climate, particularly if you have a fixed/permanent under-floor ducting network already in place.