New way to install central heating?

[zoomzoom]

Many years ago when I had central heating installed in my house in the UK, there was a pipe going to the top of the radiator on one side and a pipe going to the bottom on the other side.
Everybody I knew had the same and so is mine here.
Houses I've looked at recently on the internet have a different method. A pipe going to the bottom on both sides instead of top and bottom.
One I looked at today was different again, a pipe going to top and bottom on the same side.
Not really knowing much about central heating, if anyone understands what I am talking about, any explanation why it should be different now?
It's just something that's bugging me a little.

[Rockmusician]

Using pipes at the top and bottom of the rads is used in a loop system - exactly like a daisy chain. The problem is that the rads get colder around the system until the last one is much colder than the first one. It uses a minimum of piping, though.
The more usual system with the pipes at the bottom of all the rads has a hot pipe and a return pipe to all of the rads from the boiler, so a lot more piping but more efficient. The piping sort of looks like a ladder with the rungs being the rads and the sides of the ladder being the hot and return pipes.

[zoomzoom]

Thanks for the explanation Rock. I've been without a computer for a few days, so sorry for the late reply.

[Rockmusician]

No problem and I hope it helped!

[scanniaman]

Interesting, may be this explains our problem. We have 4 large rads and 2 heated towel rads. The furthest large rad works perfect, hot all over . The other 3 large rads only get hot on the top half and very little warmth on the bottom half. The 2 towel rads, located centrally in the house get hot all over as well. One person has suggested that the manifold system is way too close to the wood burner back-boiler , about 1 mtr or so, which isn't giving the hot water much of a run off from the back boiler before it hits a lot of restrictions, ie, the manifold.
can anyone say that this is the reason for the rads not getting 100% hot or is it something else ?
Thank you.

[chazd]

If your pump has more than one speed setting turn it to max.

The other thing to do is to slightly close the gate valves on the end radiator to reduce the flow which should increase the flow to the other radiators. You may need to do this on the other radiators too and also check that your header tank is full.

Hope this helps

Chaz

[Jake]

We run 8 rads from our wood fired back boiler and it took a couple of weeks of fine tuning the individual rad flow valves to get the heat where we wanted it, but it was worth the effort and mostly everything works fine, we also have auto air bleeders fitted. Been working fine for eight years now.
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Everyone makes me happy, some when they arrive, others when they leave.

[zoomzoom]

Jake, although it doesn't take much to bleed a radiator and I am perhaps in the minority but I didn't know automatic air bleeders were available, so I found your post very interesting.
Thank you for that point.