Heating....

Conanius

Conanius

Conanius

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
12,904
Decided on GD as I couldn't think of a better place for it.

How do you have your home heating set up?

We currently have a gas combi boiler for our 2 bed ground floor flat. Central heating is set to come on in the morning for a period (0600-0930), quick top up in the middle of the day (1300-1400), and then an evening session (17:30-20:30). 'Target' Temperature is 21 degrees C, which it seems to get to easily enough each time, with it dropping to probably 17-18 overnight.

Question is, what is the most efficient way of heating the place? It's a rented property so no suggestions of bricking up all the windows and pouring in lead to the wall cavities... but seriously, would it be more efficient to just leave it on from the morning start time to the evening finish time?

I'm sure to someone who has half a clue this is a stupid question, but when you think each time it comes on for the start of a program its going flat out for however long to heat up all the water, and then can gently tick over for the rest of the time

Aware there will be other variables to take into account (the flats ability to hold onto heat, the amount of heating required to hit the target temeperature etc) but roughly... what do you do?
 
Mines set to come on at 8am and go off at 11pm, target temp is 18C. With all the outside air vents closed it rarely comes on, even now in the middle of winter.
 
Knocking 1C off your target would help, but obviously don't do that if you feel cold.

As for the rest, you want heat when you need it to be warm, so that will depend on you.

If your combi is like mine, hot water is 'on demand', so timing is irrelevant. If you have stored hot water then the above comment re: heating applies instead.
 
Is there someone at home during the day? Can you set individual timings for each day of the week? if no one is at home Mon-Fri during the day, why have the heating coming on to an empty house? if your timer doesn't support individual days, get one that does, they're not expensive.
 
I do it manually, leave heating on always, set thermostat to about 15 at night/at work. And 18ish when home. Although I seem to like a different templates day to day.
 
I usually have mine come on at about 730 to 10 am...then its back on from 12 to 5 pm then from 7pm to 11pm...although my mum is at home so during the day she usually turns it off.

Have mine set to about 19c when the heating comes on...my hot water is taken care of by a megaflow system, which i just recently had installed...cost me £1500 for the megaflow syste,...its a pretty big one ie cylinder but does the job superbly as i have 2 shower systems and having hot water all the time is great as it was a bloody pain in the arse when someone turned the water on from another tap and id get a blast of icy cold water...now no problems with ice cold water....hot water in the shower stays nice and hot and i dont have to worry about someone turning the tap on and interrupting my hot steamy shower:p
 
AcidHell2 said:
I do it manually, leave heating on always, set thermostat to about 15 at night/at work. And 18ish when home. Although I seem to like a different templates day to day.
Click to expand...

Parents do this too, and there's some logic to it, but it means you wake up/come in to a cold house, and the heating tends to get turned off on the way out/to bed, so you're still heating the house while no-one is about.
 
mines not set to come on at all atm, temps at night arnt as cold atm, got no need to have it on
 
Berserker said:
Parents do this too, and there's some logic to it, but it means you wake up/come in to a cold house, and the heating tends to get turned off on the way out/to bed, so you're still heating the house while no-one is about.
Click to expand...

trouble is I do shift work and times change every day. So not really any other option. works reasonably well though. Not really bothered about the morning, get up and go to work within 15mins.
 
Temps this week

averageweek.png


But with these settings
6:40am til 9:00 am
Then
5:30 til 9:00 pm
The house does this over 24hrs

24hrheat.png
 
I've no idea what my heating is set to other than it being far too hot because my mum always complains about it being cold. If I had control over heating I'd leave it set to 278K (I couldn't work out how to do a degrees Celsius sign, and writing 5 degrees Celsius was too much effort... Oh wait... :o).
Heating costs a huge amount, is bad for your 'carbon footprint', and people wouldn't even notice it being 'cold' if they dressed appropriately for the weather.
 
Last edited:
Scubascorpion, how are you getting/processing that data?

Our system is set for a couple hours in the morning, hour around the kids bedtime and an hour when the wife gets home from work in the evenings. Target is 20c.

However our system only has a 24 hour clock, so i'm going to be pulling out the existing wall thermostat and fitting one of these in it's place.

When the builders replacing the heating here they put the thermostat back in the same place as the old one, in the downstairs hallway. Which doesn't seem to be working as all the heat from the hallway goes upstairs and the thermostat never seems to turn off, meaning the boiler runs most of the time the system is active.
 
At the moment my heating is set at 1/3rd of maximum on the combi boiler and the timer is set to come on between 6.45am and 8.15am so that its warm when I get up and is off by the time I'm going out for work, then it comes on at 6.45pm and goes off at 11.30pm so its warm by the time I get back from the gym and off when I get into bed at about midnight.

I'm sorting my loft insulation out this week too so I should need it on even less. My gas bills are usually OK, for the whole of January it was £59.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom