Put your heating on yet

alx said:
Yes.....because I live in Aberdeen lol.

I have a smart thermostat anyway so it turns on and off as required throughout the year.
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I wonder how these work when it comes to being in bed, etc.

e.g. Say you like to walk around the house and the temp to be 20 but in bed you have a big duvet on top of you that may be too hot. Does the thermostat know to drop to say 16 at night? Then back to 20 an hour before you wake up?
 
Psycho Sonny said:
I wonder how these work when it comes to being in bed, etc.

e.g. Say you like to walk around the house and the temp to be 20 but in bed you have a big duvet on top of you that may be too hot. Does the thermostat know to drop to say 16 at night? Then back to 20 an hour before you wake up?
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You schedule them just like a normal programmable stat.

I.e. I want 20C at 7am, 16C during the day, 21C 6-11pm, then 17C at night.
 
Don't need heating til you can see your breath on the air when you're watching telly.

Thats what jumpers are for! :p
 
We just leave ours on all year round set to 20C all of the time. It doesnt kick in through summer because it is naturally warm enough anyway.

Im not quite sure why you would turn a system off as such
 
Psycho Sonny said:
I wonder how these work when it comes to being in bed, etc.

e.g. Say you like to walk around the house and the temp to be 20 but in bed you have a big duvet on top of you that may be too hot. Does the thermostat know to drop to say 16 at night? Then back to 20 an hour before you wake up?
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Yeah this is my concern. There are definite, and very big, advantages to pushing your house to maintain the same temperature all year round - namely that the mass of the building stores a lot of heat which might otherwise be lost if you were to turn the heating off for months.

But I have been thinking about turning the heating on for the last couple of days and I don't really want it to be 19C at night!

Then, realistically how much lower do you put it for the nights...
 
Still in shorts and t-shirt in my flat. I don't think I've turned the heating on once in the 2 years I've been here. Joys of a modern flat
 
dirtychinchilla said:
There are definite, and very big, advantages to pushing your house to maintain the same temperature all year round - namely that the mass of the building stores a lot of heat which might otherwise be lost if you were to turn the heating off for months.
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Please explain what you mean here? I don't think the thermal mass has any relevance.
 
Room temps regularly dropping to 16-17 these days so using a bit of heating as and when to get it back to 18.

GeForce said:
Please explain what you mean here? I don't think the thermal mass has any relevance.
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Sounds like the argument that's it's better to keep the water tank hot 24 hours a day rather than just heating it up when you want a shower. Tip: it's not.
 
If you heat up the thermal mass of your building for say, 8 hours a day, in the other 24 hours of the day, the heat will leak out of the thermal mass. The next day, you turn your heating back on for another 8 hours, and it does the same thing. You use x amount of energy.

Instead, you heat up your building to 19C and keep it at that temperature for 24 hours a day. The amount of energy used in this process once the thermal mass of the building has risen to the desired temperature is less than if you were to only heat for 8 hours a day.

I think that basically it's a lot less energy to top up the temperature of the building than restore it each day.

The UK is far far far behind when it comes to heating and energy efficiency. If you went to Scandinavia, which is arguably the most efficient region of the the world when it comes to heating, they use exactly this model along with weather compensation to ensure that the energy used is minimal.

Just see if I can find a link....


http://www.yourhome.gov.au/passive-design/thermal-mass

Seriously, it's the best thing to do, even though it doesn't instantly make sense.

Regarding the hot water tank thing, hot water tanks are very inefficient, firstly. Secondly, although you wouldn't do this in your own home, if you ran a district heating network where you use hot water in an energy grid like we use electricity, you can basically get instantaneous hot water to any location by allowing people to tap off a massive source of water, which in part maintains its temperature through its thermal mass. As you do not design for peak loads, you have an amount of water in the system that could be tapped by say 50% of people all at once.

Why do you think it's not better to keep your water tank hot all day?

EDIT: there's a lot of controversy online about this, but I think this article is helpful:

http://www.thegreenage.co.uk/is-it-...eating-on-all-the-time-or-turn-it-on-and-off/

I'm going to try putting my heating on all the time for a week, and then have it scheduled for the other week, and see how my meter readings work out. Hopefully the temperature change won't be too dramatic.
 
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Incorrect. You are making the assumption that heat loss only occurs when the heating is off. In fact, the rate of loss is proportional to the difference between the inside and outside temperatures.

So the lower the average temperature over the day, the less the heat loss. 19C over 24 hours is worse (more loss) than 19C for 12 hours and 16C for 12 hours (average 17.5C).

The same argument is true of a hot water tank.
 
I haven't had heating in my (fairly sheltered ground floor) flat for years. I have plenty of jumpers and a fan heater in the bathroom for showers, 'cos I'm not a masochist.

Which makes life even more difficult now I'm looking after Mum at her place. Despite the mild autumn she already thinks I'm trying to kill her if the thermostat goes under 23! I may have to buy one of those water cooled vests Formula 1 drivers wear. Or wrap her in polystyrene.
 
Andrew_McP said:
I haven't had heating in my (fairly sheltered ground floor) flat for years.
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I had that when I was in a terraced studio flat, with African neighbours in all the surrounding flats. I had my windows wide open even when it was snowing mid-winter, because they'd whack their heating on full if temperatures were lower that 30ºC!! :D
 
Middle floor flat at moment so no. It's got electric heaters which I think are expensive to run so they won't be going on at all.
We'll be in the house before Christmas though and my other half is seemingly made of ice all year round. She likes the 16tog duvets, my limit is 4.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
I wonder how these work when it comes to being in bed, etc.

e.g. Say you like to walk around the house and the temp to be 20 but in bed you have a big duvet on top of you that may be too hot. Does the thermostat know to drop to say 16 at night? Then back to 20 an hour before you wake up?
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As GeForce says, you can have an almost unlimited number of time blocks throughout the day/night and set each time block's temperature individually.

Mine also has a geolocation feature, so it turns the heating down (to a temperature of your choosing) when I'm not in my flat so the heating isn't on when I'm not there. Pretty neat.
 
joeyjojo said:
Sounds like the argument that's it's better to keep the water tank hot 24 hours a day rather than just heating it up when you want a shower. Tip: it's not.
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Although i agree with you, depending on your system it doesn't actually cost a lot to keep a water tank hot 24/7.

During a 2 week period, we used about 225Kw/h, which equates to about £6.20 at 2.77p per Kw/h. This included hot water tank 24/7, an average of 2 showers a day, moderate cooking with gas and a gas fire on for a couple nights for a few hours.
 
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