So who’s put their heating on yet ?
- Thread starter petespeed
- Start date
lordsummit
Moderator
Temperature in the house without heating currently 11 degrees. Lounge warm last night, and thankfully the big hearth acts like a giant storage heater. Got to say I’d prefer to be beaten daily on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly than endure this amount of freezingness on a regular basis. I will be in the next few weeks going round trying to seal gaps, particularly between the walls and the floor in the kitchen, we have no foundations, solid walls, and flag floors. The floors stop short of the walls in the kitchen. A job lot of expanding foam will be being bought!
I have a little screen like this then tap into each room to set temp and timing throughout the day. Easy to override if you want.
As above the TRVs are battery powered and good for two years at least as i'll set them all on open for the summer and disconnect.
It's a simple job to retrofit the TRVs to an existing head and link them to your room designations.
Your bathroom rad and tank shouldn't be in series but in parallel; in practice i leave the bathroom rad on full and set hot water loop on for 90 minutes morning and evening in winter.
Just be careful not to go too mad and drastically reduce natural ventilation, this is how old houses get a bad rep for damp and mould.
hifinutt
hifinutt
thanks bob . yes its probably an e or even an F . just waiting to see if AA qualifies which i dont think it does
ToTo Man
the band not the dog
Until this week I felt a smug sense of achievement as in the autumn I fiddled around with the flow rate, heating curve and desired in-room temperatures and managed to reduce our gas consumption by an average of 30% in October and November compared to the same time last year. I achieved this by reduced our boiler's max flow rate from 80C to 60C, reducing the heating curve from 2.6 to between 1.5 and 2.0 (I find that colder weather requires a higher heating curve so I need to remember to check the weather forecast and tweak the curve before going to bed!). I also dropped the desired in-room temp from 17C to 16C, which seems like a small change but it's surprising how much easier it is for the boiler to heat the house to 16C than 17C when the flow rate and heating curve have been throttled back!
After making these changes I found that the boiler was spending most of its time modulating around 34C-42C to maintain the 16C room temperature, which was significantly lower than before. There was also fewer instances of the desired in-room temperature being slightly overshot and causing the heating to turn off, so no more interludes of cold radiators during the day. I don't know if having the boiler running continuously from morning to night is better for its longevity than allowing it to turn off for 30-60mins every few hours but it definitely feels more comfortable having a continuous level of warmth in the radiators.
This was all ticking along quite nicely until this recent period of sustained cold weather. The boiler is now pegged at 59C-60C for most of the day and the in-room temperature isn't getting beyond 14.5C even when the heating has been on all day (it's currently -9C outside as I write this!). It's probably not helped by the fact that I've set the in-room temperature to fall back to 13C overnight (I'm worried about the longevity implications of running the boiler 24/7), so it's having to heat a colder house than it would if I kept it on through the night.
Is any of what I'm doing bad for the boiler? Would I be better off cranking the max flow rate back up so that the boiler isn't running continuously, or does it not make a difference? (We don't need it any warmer in the house, we're coping with the temps ok, I just don't want to inadvertently f*ck the boiler!).
FWIW the boiler is a Vaillant Ecotech 838 and we have the VSMART thermostat with weather compensation.
After making these changes I found that the boiler was spending most of its time modulating around 34C-42C to maintain the 16C room temperature, which was significantly lower than before. There was also fewer instances of the desired in-room temperature being slightly overshot and causing the heating to turn off, so no more interludes of cold radiators during the day. I don't know if having the boiler running continuously from morning to night is better for its longevity than allowing it to turn off for 30-60mins every few hours but it definitely feels more comfortable having a continuous level of warmth in the radiators.
This was all ticking along quite nicely until this recent period of sustained cold weather. The boiler is now pegged at 59C-60C for most of the day and the in-room temperature isn't getting beyond 14.5C even when the heating has been on all day (it's currently -9C outside as I write this!). It's probably not helped by the fact that I've set the in-room temperature to fall back to 13C overnight (I'm worried about the longevity implications of running the boiler 24/7), so it's having to heat a colder house than it would if I kept it on through the night.
Is any of what I'm doing bad for the boiler? Would I be better off cranking the max flow rate back up so that the boiler isn't running continuously, or does it not make a difference? (We don't need it any warmer in the house, we're coping with the temps ok, I just don't want to inadvertently f*ck the boiler!).
FWIW the boiler is a Vaillant Ecotech 838 and we have the VSMART thermostat with weather compensation.
Last edited:
Mike Reed
pfm Member
Indeed, in parallel but as separately programmed. My wife turns the water on for half and hour now (used to be much longer with gravity feed) in the evening only; does all her washing-up, a shower plus oodles next morning, Your 3 hours seems excessive, but our cylinder is large and new.
No, it will run indefinitely like this, or like anything else. It's a machine, running within its standard operating envelope. It's like asking if your car will wear out and break down if you drive everywhere at 35mph and take all day over it or drive at 70 and stop for an hour here and there. In either case it will be fine. Sure, it will need servicing and maintenance, but so does everything. An annual service takes half an hour and costs £50-60. If it needs a repair after 10 years, so be it. So does everything, sooner or later.
I'm afraid we're a bit extravagant and have a bath most evenings, i think we'd just about heat the tank in 45 minutes. 300 litre tank and 19kW boiler heating from about 12 to 60C if completely cold. I'll have a go at the maths.
New cylinder could make a big difference, when i took out our old one it was so full of scale i couldn't lift it. Pumped versus convection is a big improvement too.
Mike Reed
pfm Member
Ah, 14o l cylinder and 18 kWh boiler here and never baths; the sums seem to tally now.
ToTo Man
the band not the dog
Opposite problem here. RH in our house is currently 35%-42% depending on which room you're in and which hygrometer you trust, that's the lowest we've experienced for a long-time. My nasal passages were initially stinging with the dryness but they seem to be acclimatising, which is a relief as I was seriously considering resorting to hanging up wet towels in every room to try to nudge the RH up a few %. Why are you trying to reduce your RH below 50%? You should be safe as long as it's below 70% provided you have decent ventilation/insulation.
50% is ok for me not trying to get it lower. Just maintaining it at 50% still produces that amount of water. 50% is the target to avoid mould and condensation
ToTo Man
the band not the dog
Depending on wind direction I can smell the exhaust fumes from an idling petrol- or diesel-engined car from upwards of 10 metres away, - I'd therefore want the exhaust pipe of that heater a lot further away from the fresh air intake than shown in the above installation! Also I wonder if the chap in that video is still on speaking terms with his neighbours?!!
1-2 litres per day per person in your breath and sweat, the exact amount varying with physical exertion and temperature. It's a problem in bedrooms because people spend lots of time there.
If I do an extremely hard day in the mountains in summer I can consume 5-6 litres of water over the day without peeing more than a litre or so. Athletes can consume 1 litre of water an hour at maximum effort, I bet the footballers tonight will do similar in the heat.
The fag packet calculations say that this should take about 50 minutes, 300kg water x 48degC delta T x 19kW, so I'd say that your observation of 45 minutes is about bang on. (SHC of water rounded to 4 J/degC/g for ease of calculation).
mansr
Objectionist
After a Molotov cocktail nightcap, presumably.
narabdela
who?
It's not a 2 litre car engine in a box
They're all but silent and I suspect the amount of fuel it sips also renders the exhaust gas smell a non issue.