We have sll become pretty used to having central heating in our homes these days.  Very nice it is too.  I just cannot imagine having to live anywhere that did not have heating these days.  I do remember when I was younger – the only boiler in the house was the old copper that stood in the corner of the kitchen, we used to fill it up with pails of cold water from the kitchen tap and it would take an age to literally come to the boil and we’d have lashings of hot water for every task known.  But it did not heat the house.   We had moved on from the open fire – my mother had serious reservations about having a coal fire in the house so we had a gas fire that spitted now and again and made a strange whooshing noise when it was lit and extinguised.   Todays heating engineers are able to put a new system in so quickly now and so long as the pipework is still adequate, the same dimensions and not rotted in any part, a new  system should really just slot in place of the one taken out.