Heating thermostat in the hallway

[Bingy man]

This has always been a big question, is it better to leave the system on and keep a minimal temperature or let it free fall. Thinking of the physic's it takes less energy to raise a temperature from 20° C to X rather than 5° C to X . I use a Honeywell thermostat that allows you to program in six time periods each with it's own setpoint so I keep an overnight temperature of 15°C which rises to 17° C at the time we get up and 18.5° in the evening .

Years ago before all these crazy energy costs I’d advise customers to leave the heating on at 15 -17 deg then turn it up when home but like with a lot of the old advise it’s out dated . A modern designed home using the latest materials and insulation in conjunction with an efficient boiler and system will heat up quickly as the fabric of the building temperature wise doesn’t change a lot . Would this advice apply to a 17 /18 century house built with no cavities and 24” thick walls probably not . In short it will come down to the age of your property and the standard of the insulation, type of windows etc etc . Imo the older draughty , poorly insulated properties will benefit from the heating being left on at a lower temp to reduce the time and energy it takes to get this type of property up to say 20-21 deg .
Another often overlooked issue is the outside temperature-: a short cold snap of -3/4 degrees for a day or 2 probably won’t make much difference to the average person however the longer the cold snap lasts then your usual 20deg will feel cold as those cold drafts find there way around your home and heat finds it’s way out . As a gas engineer for many years a £1 for every time I unblocked the combustion air vent for the central heating boiler would make me incredibly rich .

 

[Bingy man]

I should of included that my flat is brick walls internal and external with bison beams making up the ceilings and only takes around 20 mins to get up to the magical 20degs but I’m always keeping an eye on the outside temperature as above.

 

[NewbieRaf]

I was recently in Bulgaria where my brother in law is doing up a property and when I say doing up I mean it. I caught him ripping off the old roof and building a new one with a slant good enough for his aspired solar panels. What was very interesting (weird) - they do not put any insulation as standard between the roof and the ceiling and that’s because the ceiling all concrete. In the UK it’s plasterboard. Now, I must admit I am the least knowledgeable when it comes to these things but I would have thought given the climate (colder than the UK) and that they even put external wall insulation on all these houses, I was expecting simple insulation in that void. But no, it’s all air. Literally.

 

[Ozi]

I still think heat the person not the house is the way forward, we have our heating set to 18°C but limited by time so it rarely gets there unless the outside temperature allows, I ware a jumper SWMBO sits on a heat pad with a blanket in cold weather and my kids run so much computer equipment in their bed rooms they need to open windows if the outside temp moves above freezing. must get back to work the leccy bill is due

 

[Scruples]

Hey All

I’ve never really understood why my Thermostat was originally placed in the ground floor (uk town house - new build 2009) not far from the front door where it’s cold. Many years ago I changed the my myson thermostat to next and whilst I was as it I wired in the living room away from the coldness of the hallway.

Now with gas prices etc I’m wondering if I’m better off moving it back?

Thoughts?

Just have a mobile thermostat and put it where you want the best heat control. Personally, I think the best place is in the living room. The rest of the house will heat up but be less than the living room provided the door is kept closed. TRVs help too.
If you're stuck with a fixed stat in the hall then set it lower, ~17°C , while a stat set at 19-19.5°C in the living room is a good temperature.

 

[ian33a]

In trying to cut our heating bills via research on the internet, it seems to me that there is a certain amount of low hanging fruit which is obvious but that most of it comes down to individual situation. There are a massive number of variables in every property and what works well in one might do the opposite in another.

Through choice, we live in a reasonably large hybrid house in the country. Heating is by oil (no mains gas), hydroponic underfloor in all but two rooms - those being wood burners. I don't see GSHP or ASHP as the answer for now because everything suggests we need a massive improvement in insulation (which will upset the fabric of the house too much) and the insulation and uPVC glazing, in the main, isn't too bad. Anyway, one installer suggested that we would need a second single phase power supply or a conversion to three phase so as to power the heat pumps. That, in itself, rang alarm bells for me.

So, we're running incremental experiments for our use case. I've changed five of the eleven thermostats from mechanical dial to programmable and we're going to try temperature set back at night. At the same time, the other six thermostats are being set to a relatively low temperature and the doors to those rooms shut. There's no sense in heating a bedroom containing a turbo trainer, for example. This flies in the face of some of the stuff that I have read on the web but, we will give it a go.

Between the middle of November and the first week of December, with temperatures cooling but not cold, we were burning about £13.50 of oil per day. In the past week, with these changes and with my sister-in-law visiting (so her bedroom heated) and it being around freezing day and night outside, the heating cost has been about the same as back in November. Measuring oil usage is difficult as there is no meter. Instead, it's a dipstick, a retractable ruler and an Excel calculation. It's too soon to tell if these changes have made a difference or not - five days of cold weather and the daily cost is no worse than before. It seems to me that, with heating costs as they are, a few hundred quid on thermostats is worth the investment as a trial.

For me, the technology isn't mature enough to convince me to invest a massive amount of money in something which is a bit of a punt (GSHP, ASHP, being examples) and the motives behind some of what is being peddled appear questionable - Boris promoting heat pumps, for me, being a prime example.

 

[NewbieRaf]

During the cold snap I’m using about 8 plum pounds per day on heating as opposed to around 5-6 pounds. It takes my living room about an hour to get from 17 degrees to 19 when the Mrs airs the room after cooking grrr

 

[John Brown]

This has always been a big question, is it better to leave the system on and keep a minimal temperature or let it free fall. Thinking of the physic's it takes less energy to raise a temperature from 20° C to X rather than 5° C to X . I use a Honeywell thermostat that allows you to program in six time periods each with it's own setpoint so I keep an overnight temperature of 15°C which rises to 17° C at the time we get up and 18.5° in the evening .

To be honest, I don't think there's ever been any question regarding the physics of it. Not among physicists anyway.
As I understand things, it's always used less thermal energy to heat the house only when you need it, regardless of insulation or anything else.
The only reason there might be a debate nowadays is because of the efficiency increase when running condensing boilers at lower flow temperature.

The same may apply to air and ground source heat pumps, I don't know. Like one of the previous posters, I'd need a bigger electrical supply for a heat pump, which would make it ridiculously expensive.

 

[dgs2001]

There is simply no magic one size fits all for this conversation.

First things first if you want to cut heating bills then you need to understand how your house loses heat and how much ( a proper heat loss calculation will tell you)
You also need to understand how you use and interact with your house. (This is information any heating engineer should be skilfully extracting from their clients)
You also need to take on some interesting physics along the lines of it takes more energy to heat a litre of water from 5 to 50 degrees C than it does to maintain it at 35 degrees C and then top it up to 50 degrees when needed. (Obvious caveats here - how long are we storing it at 35 and how quickly does the environment its stored in allow the heat to escape.)

Its the first and last of these three things which can be manipulated to increase the overall efficiency of a heating system.

In terms of heat loss we can insulate better and this is a massive help, but if you live in a Victorian town house with single glazed sash windows then just accept your gonna need more gas!

Interaction is a complex one, if people are allowing certain areas of a house to become cold (spare rooms etc) then this can affect the heat loss calculation as generally any heat loss calculation would assume a spare room connected to say a bedroom, that spare room would be at 16 degrees C or even 18 degrees C. Therefore if your spare room is down at 5 or 6 degrees or lower then thats the equivalent of turning your poorly insulated internal bedroom wall into an externally facing wall.

As can be seen from the point above physics controls how quickly a space looses heat and consequently how much heat must be put into a space to maintain or heat it. if we have an internal space surrounded by other internal heated spaces (all sides and above and below) then the heat required will be alot less than if that same space is surrounded by the unheated cold outdoors (think shed or unheated garage in winter)


Historically heating boilers were either on or off and they output heat at a pretty fixed temperature depending on what position the rotary knob was set at on the front. The boilers themselves were massively inefficient usually due to the incorrect ratio of air and gas being burned.
In laymen's terms, if you put a £100 of gas into an old non condensing boiler you would achieve roughly £45 to £55 of useful heat into your house whereas when running efficiently that same £100 of gas put into a modern condensing boiler will achieve roughly £83 to £95 of useful heat into your house.

Modern boilers and controls allow further efficiency by modulating the heating water flow temperature around your house depending on the external temperature. Remember our heat loss calculation - with this we understand how much heat in KW or Btu's our house needs to maintain or increase temperature for a given set of environmental variables (outside temperature and the known rate at which our house looses heat)
Using our modern controls we can increase or decrease the boiler flow temperature, when its say 14 degrees externally we only need a low heat to be circulated around our system to maintain or increase the internal temperature as the heat loss from our house is relatively slow and small. However when its -3 outside modern controls will automatically increase the boiler heating flow temperature to maintain or increase our house temperature.


When installed properly and set up/used correctly modern smart controls will run a heating system to an optimum, however they can only do this if all the above factors have been taken into account and they cannot predict the chances of some glorious winter sun streaming through the windows providing a reasonable solar uplift to internal temps an hour after said controls have heated the space!

I fully understand why some people prefer to tinker and constantly turn up / down the heating (usually the older generation cos thats what we did) but in a well understood house with modern controls the heating can be left to its own devices and provide a comfortable user defined temperature 365 days a year with likely over the long term the most efficient use of gas.
If one day a 'tinkerer' turns up to high a radiator to heat a usually unused space and accidently leaves it on high or opens a window and forgets the heating is on then any perceived savings are gone.


The full evolution of smart controls will see individual radiator thermostatic heads (TRV heads) replaced with smart thermostatic heads which will provide even more control and effectively change single zone heating systems into multizone heating systems where individual room temps can be monitored and heat maintained or lifted as needed to run a heating system in the most efficient way possible.


Well that's enough rambling from me, and of course these are musings from my understanding and opinions so any professors out there who wish to dismiss my musings please do so

 

[Misterdog]

in cold weather radiator output may be too low to achieve the set room temperature. The solution - increase the flow temperature. This may not change boiler efficiency greatly as in cold weather the radiators and pipework will anyway lose more heat.

The solution is called weather compensation control.
The outside temperature is monitored, and as it gets colder it 'turns up the boiler stat' increasing the boiler flow temperature.

 

[Misterdog]

In terms of heat loss we can insulate better and this is a massive help, but if you live in a Victorian town house with single glazed sash windows then just accept your gonna need more gas!

Or more thermal layers on your body.
Plenty of good fleece thermal clothing is available these days.

We never died when we had frost on the inside of the windows in the 1970's.

The modern solution is to turn the global warming up. Because people have become accustomed to taking energy for granted.

I'm typing this with 4 upper body layers on, thermal long johns and a wooly hat.

Living room temperature is 14 C.

I'm not cold, though neither am I hot.
Comfortable - contentedness.

 

[dgs2001]

Yep, more layers is a good option, but its each to their own and I cant see many of the occupiers of the Victorian town houses in Cheltenham rushing to the cashmere drawer quite yet !

 

[John Brown]

You also need to take on some interesting physics along the lines of it takes more energy to heat a litre of water from 5 to 50 degrees C than it does to maintain it at 35 degrees C and then top it up to 50 degrees when needed.

What are you basing that assertion on? If that were true for a couple of hours at 35 degrees, why not for a year?
I'd be interested to see a link to this interesting physics.

 

[Misterdog]

Yep, more layers is a good option, but its each to their own and I cant see many of the occupiers of the Victorian town houses in Cheltenham rushing to the cashmere drawer quite yet !

While assuaging their consciences by saying that more should be done about global warming, and aren't energy prices ridiculous.

The only way to make old victorian houses thermally efficient is to demolish them.
Mine is a stone built detached built in 1865.
The insulate Britain activists really annoy me as they have no idea of how pre cavity wall houses are constructed.

 

[John Brown]

The solution is called weather compensation control.
The outside temperature is monitored, and as it gets colder it 'turns up the boiler stat' increasing the boiler flow temperature.

My quite old condensing boiler has that feature, but it's manual, sadly. I suppose I could automate it with a stepper motor to turn the control...

 

[Quilly21]

Someone in an earlier post mentioned Tado smart heating. I installed Tado smart radiator thermostat heads to all my thermostatic radiator valves, I ignore my central thermostat which is set to max or bypassed, these give precise temperature control to all rooms and can be set to come on at different temperatures at different times of the day or night.
The system can detect open doors or windows and switch off heating or turn on and off heating when you leave or return calculating how long to achieve the desired temperature.
I would say my system paid for itself in the first year of use and makes for simple control especially if you use Echo or similar devices for voice control.
I has proven particularly useful when away in winter as you can monitor the temperature of the rooms from your smart phone app.
I know there are other similar systems but I only have experience of this system and it knocks manual TRVs into a cocked hat as they say.

 

[Bingy man]

There is simply no magic one size fits all for this conversation.

First things first if you want to cut heating bills then you need to understand how your house loses heat and how much ( a proper heat loss calculation will tell you)
You also need to understand how you use and interact with your house. (This is information any heating engineer should be skilfully extracting from their clients)
You also need to take on some interesting physics along the lines of it takes more energy to heat a litre of water from 5 to 50 degrees C than it does to maintain it at 35 degrees C and then top it up to 50 degrees when needed. (Obvious caveats here - how long are we storing it at 35 and how quickly does the environment its stored in allow the heat to escape.)

Its the first and last of these three things which can be manipulated to increase the overall efficiency of a heating system.

In terms of heat loss we can insulate better and this is a massive help, but if you live in a Victorian town house with single glazed sash windows then just accept your gonna need more gas!

Interaction is a complex one, if people are allowing certain areas of a house to become cold (spare rooms etc) then this can affect the heat loss calculation as generally any heat loss calculation would assume a spare room connected to say a bedroom, that spare room would be at 16 degrees C or even 18 degrees C. Therefore if your spare room is down at 5 or 6 degrees or lower then thats the equivalent of turning your poorly insulated internal bedroom wall into an externally facing wall.

As can be seen from the point above physics controls how quickly a space looses heat and consequently how much heat must be put into a space to maintain or heat it. if we have an internal space surrounded by other internal heated spaces (all sides and above and below) then the heat required will be alot less than if that same space is surrounded by the unheated cold outdoors (think shed or unheated garage in winter)


Historically heating boilers were either on or off and they output heat at a pretty fixed temperature depending on what position the rotary knob was set at on the front. The boilers themselves were massively inefficient usually due to the incorrect ratio of air and gas being burned.
In laymen's terms, if you put a £100 of gas into an old non condensing boiler you would achieve roughly £45 to £55 of useful heat into your house whereas when running efficiently that same £100 of gas put into a modern condensing boiler will achieve roughly £83 to £95 of useful heat into your house.

Modern boilers and controls allow further efficiency by modulating the heating water flow temperature around your house depending on the external temperature. Remember our heat loss calculation - with this we understand how much heat in KW or Btu's our house needs to maintain or increase temperature for a given set of environmental variables (outside temperature and the known rate at which our house looses heat)
Using our modern controls we can increase or decrease the boiler flow temperature, when its say 14 degrees externally we only need a low heat to be circulated around our system to maintain or increase the internal temperature as the heat loss from our house is relatively slow and small. However when its -3 outside modern controls will automatically increase the boiler heating flow temperature to maintain or increase our house temperature.


When installed properly and set up/used correctly modern smart controls will run a heating system to an optimum, however they can only do this if all the above factors have been taken into account and they cannot predict the chances of some glorious winter sun streaming through the windows providing a reasonable solar uplift to internal temps an hour after said controls have heated the space!

I fully understand why some people prefer to tinker and constantly turn up / down the heating (usually the older generation cos thats what we did) but in a well understood house with modern controls the heating can be left to its own devices and provide a comfortable user defined temperature 365 days a year with likely over the long term the most efficient use of gas.
If one day a 'tinkerer' turns up to high a radiator to heat a usually unused space and accidently leaves it on high or opens a window and forgets the heating is on then any perceived savings are gone.


The full evolution of smart controls will see individual radiator thermostatic heads (TRV heads) replaced with smart thermostatic heads which will provide even more control and effectively change single zone heating systems into multizone heating systems where individual room temps can be monitored and heat maintained or lifted as needed to run a heating system in the most efficient way possible.


Well that's enough rambling from me, and of course these are musings from my understanding and opinions so any professors out there who wish to dismiss my musings please do so

A very long read pre 12 am on a Saturday but a more technical version of what I’ve previously said and other post that 1 size will never fit all and with all the smart controls in the world the end user can ultimately affect the way a boiler/ system works. With reference to non condensing boilers and customer habits a common reported fault was the boiler isn’t working correctly- upon arrival the rads were Luke warm or cold but the boiler was hot . I’d then look at the boiler stat which was always set to minimum and the room stat ( if fitted) was set to 30 deg . It’s freezing the cust would say I’ve turned the stat to 30 but it’s still cold ! I’d then spend the next 20-30 minutes explaining that the boiler has reached its set temperature (min) and it’s done its job and turned off. It will now cycle on and off heating the circs and won’t be on long enough to bring the rads upto temp therefore the thermostat is pointless. So a polite request for a cuppa and while the customer went about putting the kettle on I’d turn the boiler stat to 3 or 4 and put the stat back to 18 . Bit of a natter over a cuppa and the world put to right and I’d ask the customer to check the rads - oh I say it’s working now , it’s lovely and hot -what was the problem. You I said or your hubby and then show her the boiler stat setting and the room stat setting- in short customer education is one of the most important tools in you box . The technology may have changed but the understanding of it is beyond the average customer so it’s down to the engineers to educate the customer on how to set/ use the equipment to get the best from it in the most efficient way.

 

[NormanB]

Having watched a couple of his videos I think I will stick to my 50+ years experience in the heating industry thanks.

Not all users in this forum have experience in the industry to draw on and do not understand the principles involved beyond on/off controls and piping hot radiators. Mind you there was a lot who were in the industry who were basically ‘combi slingers’, who understood very little either, fitting over sized boilers, little attention to controls strategy, poor set up and commissioning and paying lip service in explaining the system to customers.

 

[Pedronicus]

Interaction is a complex one, if people are allowing certain areas of a house to become cold (spare rooms etc) then this can affect the heat loss calculation as generally any heat loss calculation would assume a spare room connected to say a bedroom, that spare room would be at 16 degrees C or even 18 degrees C. Therefore if your spare room is down at 5 or 6 degrees or lower then that's the equivalent of turning your poorly insulated internal bedroom wall into an externally facing wall.

I spent a fair bit of my working life trying to explain exactly that scenario to customers some of which understood at once, others just could not grasp it!

With reference to non condensing boilers and customer habits a common reported fault was the boiler isn’t working correctly- upon arrival the rads were Luke warm or cold but the boiler was hot . I’d then look at the boiler stat which was always set to minimum and the room stat ( if fitted) was set to 30 deg . It’s freezing the cust would say I’ve turned the stat to 30 but it’s still cold ! I’d then spend the next 20-30 minutes explaining that the boiler has reached its set temperature (min) and it’s done its job and turned off. It will now cycle on and off heating the circs and won’t be on long enough to bring the rads upto temp therefore the thermostat is pointless. So a polite request for a cuppa and while the customer went about putting the kettle on I’d turn the boiler stat to 3 or 4 and put the stat back to 18 . Bit of a natter over a cuppa and the world put to right and I’d ask the customer to check the rads - oh I say it’s working now , it’s lovely and hot -what was the problem. You I said or your hubby and then show her the boiler stat setting and the room stat setting- in short customer education is one of the most important tools in you box . The technology may have changed but the understanding of it is beyond the average customer so it’s down to the engineers to educate the customer on how to set/ use the equipment to get the best from it in the most efficient way.

When dealing with the same situation there were invariably cries of "It will cost a fortune to run by turning the boiler stat up!"

My usual stock answer was "You have two choices. Poor & warm or rich and cold. You have to choose which."

 

[NormanB]

But just think how much work people on you tube like the heat geek create, it gives the pro's the task of putting these jobs right later.

Funnily enough it is the exact opposite. Adam Chapman has actually grown his business on sorting out the problems created by installers who did not knowing what they were doing.

As well as correcting these design and installation errors he has also set up a very well regarded training course that is highly regarded in the industry. So much so, existing heating engineers are coughing up their own course fees to Adam to get to grips with the underpinning theory and be able to design and install successful systems for their customers. The win for them is more work for them and less come backs. Many of the heating engineers who complete the course recommend it but warn - ‘it is really hard work’.

Heating Engineers who have completed the course are registered as doing so and are listed on the Heat Geek website and that attracts customers’.

The quality of the training is recognised and attracted government investment too.

I suspect you have not actually watched his videos and do not have any particularly informed sense of some of the fundamental issues in play in the industry. What exactly is your area of expertise by the way?