Smart arse heating using smart thermostat and programmable trvs

[coolsurfer]

Now I'd love to have multi zones heating using the wireless TRV's offered by the likes of Honeywell Evohome and Heat Genius. Very impressive systems but the killer is the cost of their trv's for all 12 radiators at £55-60+ each. This brings the total system costs for them to over £1200. As you can imagine its a lot of money to invest in one go. I need to overcome this cost whilst getting as much benefit as possible

Now the idea I propose is:
1) Buy the best smart thermostat that controls my boiler and water tank
2) Buy quality programmable TRV's.

An example programmable TRV is this one:
http://www.conrad-electronic.co.uk/...4A71FEFEABF41AD650.ASTPCEN24?ref=searchDetail

I'm not sure of the quality but hopefully some of you folks could help me out.

Now some of you might say if you have to program them what is the point of getting a smart thermostat that can't control these. Well the idea is simple. I use these TRV's to program the rooms according to the times of the day we would use them say the lounge as 6pm-9pm (or even 5pm-10pm). The main point is the boiler is only going to kick off at the time I schedule using the respective mobile phone app regardless of what time is programmed.

This means for example, say I program the boiler to come on at 6.30am, because the TRV's in the lounge and dining room are programmed to be off, I still get the benefits of the smart thermostat with only the rooms I want heating actually on.

Now some might say why even bother with the smart thermostat, I have a tank so being able to control hot water remotely will be good. As well as turning heating off when I'm at work or on holiday. Or maybe I'm just dumb and can't program my old school lcd display on and need a decent app to visualise it all better

I would appreciate everyones thoughts. I appreciate I am being a cheapskate with this but if anyone can see any major flaws I've not noticed it would be good.

Thank you

CS

 

[Lumeycom]

I looked at something similar a while back as my elderly dad lives with me and is at home almost all day every day and needs to be warm. Was killing my gas bill.

Fortunatly due to the way the rad plumbing is done I put a 2port motorised valve in the feed that does upstairs and (oddly) my kitchen which is on a seperate time clock. Means my dad can have the heating on all day and its only running 5 rads instead of 14. Took a massive chunk off my monthly bills over winter.

I know its a bit ghetto but it works for me and it cost almost nothing to do.

Whatever you decide make sure you have one rad without a TRV or control of any sort, preferably in the room with the main thermostat in. Boilers don't like heating nothing plus it would skew the overall stat.

Another thing I did that saved me a fortune is a tamper proof stat that stops the wife walking past it and whacking it to 30 because "its cold outside"

Only other advice I have is that motorised TRV's can be rather noisy

 

[coolsurfer]

Do you think its possible to do the same in my house? How could I tell what way my radiating is done? I have plastic pipes going into all the radiators :S

 

[Lumeycom]

No idea.

My boiler is mounted downstairs and where the hot water for the rads comes out of the boiler it t's off for upstairs and down (although my kitchen rad is fed back down from the rad above it upstairs). So I just put the valve in the upstairs feed to block it and wired it to the timeclock.

 

[Dava]

that valve you have specified does seem pretty good but i will have a better look at it for you, it seems to be good for the application you are after because it has inbuilt frost protection and various other interlocks, what you want to achieve is basically what i do for a living [BMS] - what you would want is an isolation valve to 1 floor but you would most likely need to get some plumbing work done to create a bypass so you can allow for each zone to be isolated depending on where the heat demand is coming from, with the pipes being plastic i shouldn't imagine this being too hard/expensive. feel free to PM me with any queries or help with how the strategy/logic will want to work.

 

[FlyingFish]

Cool surfer, couple of questions.

Do you know what system you currently have? Boiler make/model/age? System design? Y/S/C/W plan?
And what are your reasons for wanting programmable trvs? Maximise your efficiency primarily or maximise control?

Mick