Almost 300 years ago, in the spring of 1731, a man named Johann Wilhelm Buderus I leased a charcoal blast furnace in Oberhessen, Germany. At that furnace, he produced pig iron as well as a variety of cast iron products. Around 1825, the family-owned Buderus company began developing and producing equipment for home heating, including stoves and eventually boilers.
Since that time, Buderus has continued to build its reputation for producing high-quality, innovative, and reliable equipment for residential and commercial heating. In 2008, the Buderus heating brand became part of the Bosch Group, another German company with over 100 years of history. Today, Buderus gas and oil-fired boilers are available in North America from Bosch Thermotechnology.
Buderus offers three major types of boilers: oil conventional, gas conventional, and gas condensing. Condensing boilers are the newer, more energy-efficient technology becoming popular today, although they’ve been around for a few decades.
In a conventional boiler, a significant portion of the heat generated by burning fuel ends up being wasted as the combustion gas is exhausted. A condensing boiler uses a longer heat exchanger or a secondary heat exchanger so that more of the heat is absorbed by the water.
In this process, the combustion gases condense into liquid that’s extremely corrosive, so the heat exchangers in condensing boilers are often constructed of high-grade stainless steel in order to resist corrosion. That improved construction can lead these boilers to have a longer lifespan as well.
Condensing boilers are able to achieve much higher energy efficiency than conventional boilers. For instance, the Buderus SSB stainless steel gas condensing boiler has an outstanding efficiency rating of 96%.
Another advantage of the Buderus SSB is that its design is based on the tough, high-quality commercial boilers produced by Buderus. But it’s been down-sized to fit in a compact residential space.
Buderus produces many other models of gas condensing boilers as well as conventional boilers to fit a wide range of households. You can’t help but wonder what kind of heating equipment they’ll be producing in the next 300 years!