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Gas -best use of boiler ??
Comments
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Ben thank you for these informative posts that do make a lot of sense but what on earth did your mum feed you on they are just so complex:)
Your controls may be different to mine, but generally there's a 24 hour clock with usually four movable toggles and some switches that should allow you to set the boiler to off, heating and hot water or just hot water.
Or it may be a digital programmer. Does the same job just may have more flexibility on number of settings. We can set ours for weekends differently to the weekdays.This valve may be damaged and leaking some hot water in to the bathroom radiator, or maybe your system has been plumbed in so this radiator is actually attached to the hot water cylinder so you can turn it on when you have a bath? You'll have to investigate it with a plumber really, but in the meantime if the radiator has a valve you can just turn that off.
As Ben says you can turn it off, we have a thermostatic one on our Bathroom and en suite.
I believe there is a reason behind it so that it acts as some form of bypass, heat overflow, for the boiler."If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future.".....
"big business is parasitic, like a mosquito, whereas I prefer the lighter touch, like that of a butterfly. "A butterfly can suck honey from the flower without damaging it," "Arunachalam Muruganantham0 -
I think the main problem people have is when they go to light the pilot flame after being off for a long time, only to find dust from the house has settled inside it (often pilot flames are close to floor level) and it won't light. However, if you have a gas boiler which has a setting to heat hot water only, I wouldn't turn it off for summer, it's probably the cheapest way to make hot water at any time of year.
Or you may find the pump and/or "y" valve may seize, due to not being in use. Just run it every so often to keep things free."If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future.".....
"big business is parasitic, like a mosquito, whereas I prefer the lighter touch, like that of a butterfly. "A butterfly can suck honey from the flower without damaging it," "Arunachalam Muruganantham0 -
The boiler thermostat sets the temperature of the water leaving the boiler.
Think it may be return water temperature. Once the water is returning close to that which it exited then it knows it can turn off for a bit.Turning it up reduces efficiency as the hotter water becomes the less readily heat transfers from the gas burner in to it. However, people use higher settings for good reasons, for example if your radiators are small it will make them heat the rooms better as hotter water also transfers its heat to the rooms quicker.
Good point I always used to run it low.
When we had a repair done in the depths of Winter 2010 the engineer set it high when he left and it does warm up much quicker and does seem to keep the warms more even.
I think I will turn it down, through the summer though, as it is less crucial for water only.
You worry about water reheating. We were without central heating for over a week due to parts. It was down to -14C, we had some electric heat downstairs (very expensive) but upstairs was perishing. As the days wore on it really did get cold. A 13.5tog feather duvet was not enough I tell you. Dew drops on your nose in the morning.Character building for the teenagers though and I could bore them with "just like when I when I were a kid".
The cost of that PCB to repair it was worth every hundred pounds."If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future.".....
"big business is parasitic, like a mosquito, whereas I prefer the lighter touch, like that of a butterfly. "A butterfly can suck honey from the flower without damaging it," "Arunachalam Muruganantham0 -
The answer is very simple.
Gas on,meter turns,costs money.
Only supply heat when you need it.
You cant change the laws of physics and so
Q= M x Cp x (t1- t2)
Where Q = quantity of energy
M = mass
Cp = specific heat capacity
t1-t2= temperature difference
If you leave your boiler on when its output isnt required then..
You will export energy to the atmosphere due to losses via the flue/condensate drain
Heat will be lost to the atmosphere buy conduction/convection and radiation
These losses will occur anyway even if you only put the boiler on when you need it but the crucial difference is that the gap between production and consumption or use of the heat energy is less.
The era of cheap energy is over.
My advice to all is the condition yourself to lower levels of comfort.
Turn your boilers off.
Only use when necessary.
Put some clothes on in Winterville.Feudal Britain needs land reform. 70% of the land is "owned" by 1 % of the population and at least 50% is unregistered (inherited by landed gentry). Thats why your slave box costs so much..0 -
Not if you have a simple boiler with a natural draught burner,a pilot light and a thermocouple with an input of about 38,000 Btu/hr:rotfl::rotfl:Maybe digressing but is it also better to have the boiler on low instead of switched off and on as it is less likely to breakdown when you need it most in winter ?Feudal Britain needs land reform. 70% of the land is "owned" by 1 % of the population and at least 50% is unregistered (inherited by landed gentry). Thats why your slave box costs so much..0 -
ah, I see now. My boiler is a very simple one and just has a on/off switch and a dial to turn it up or down. We have another dial on the hot water tank to set the temperature of the hot water (we have it set to 70C due to a weird shower system).
The controls are a fancy timer with one set of settings for the heating (on, off, timer once, timer twice) and the same for the hot water. Of course the heating is off now, although we have needed it the odd evening for 30 mins just to take the edge off. Summer...yeah right....
So I will just program the hot water for timer twice and see how we go and if we use less gas that way. As I am off this week, I will check over 4 days how much we use in 24 hours to get an average and then set it to timer and check over 4 days and see how much less it is. And I do another comparison to when we are at work/school.
The radiator in the bathroom - hmm...it has no knob on it to turn it off. Maybe it is like that on purpose.
Will definitley look into getting a jacket for the tank, that sounds perfect. It has a very thin foam layer on it, I don't think that's doing much at all.0 -
grizzly1911 wrote: »Think it may be return water temperature. Once the water is returning close to that which it exited then it knows it can turn off for a bit.
You're right, I [STRIKE]lied[/STRIKE] umm simplified and there's actually a lot more going on with the boiler thermostat that I totally glossed over.
The basic explanation is it sets the temperature of water leaving the boiler and turn it up if you need to, for example you need the radiators to be hotter as the system isn't heating the house sufficiently on lower settings. There will be an efficiency penalty for doing this, but it may be needed to make the central heating work properly in some houses or during very cold weather.
The actual situation involves explaining the design of typical heating systems. The system needs to be designed for the house, radiators are sized for the room they're in, involving some calculations regarding the room size and rate of heat loss. The rate at which a radiator emits heat depends on the radiator's surface area and the temperature of the water inside it and I believe the standard is that most systems are designed to heat the house to 20 degrees when it's -1 outside when the radiators contain water at 85 degrees.
Your boiler thermostat is really setting the temperature of all the water in the system, the exact meaning of this is it measures the returning water temperature and if the water is returning below the boiler thermostat temperature it lights the burner. While it's most efficient to deplete the water of its stored heat and return cooler water to the boiler, your system wouldn't work well, you want all of the radiators to contain hot water at the temperature your boiler thermostat is set at so that all the rooms are heated properly. If it did not heat the water enough the temperature as it moved through the system would fall too much and rooms further away from the boiler would be colder than those closer.
Because the system is a circuit and pumped around from boiler through each radiator in turn and back to the boiler we might be led in to thinking that the heat is gone by the time it returns. Not really true though, much of the heat is intentionally returning to the boiler in the water so that the last few radiators on the circuit can still heat up properly. You might under typical mid-cycle conditions have water going in at 80 degrees and returning to the boiler at 60. The reason for having these elevated temperatures, even though much of the heat is returning unused, is simply so that the heat that does transfer out of the water does it fast enough. Heat flow is proportional to temperature difference and the higher the water temperature the quicker it releases heat in to the rooms. Keep in mind that there's a lot of heat in water even at room temperature - you can put it in the freezer which will take heat out of it (you'll notice the metal pipes that contain the coolant gas on the back of the freezer getting hot), but even though it contains plenty of heat, room temperature water does not release heat in to the room. To use water as a heat carrier you need a temperature difference and the greater it is the more effectively it carries heat and this is why your boiler is actually trying to heat all the water in the system to the same temperature.
When the water returning to the boiler is the same temperature as the water leaving the boiler the heat loss from your house at the temperature you're heating it to has been matched, so the burner switches off. Or if you have an old clunker from 1980 like mine, this never happens any more
Anyway, understanding this, you'll probably want to use the boiler thermostat at low temperatures during the cooler weather and higher ones when it's very cold so that the system delivers even heat at the right level throughout the heating season. Also, if anyone has got to the end of this, you can probably see why I glossed over it a bit!0 -
grizzly1911 wrote: »Or it may be a digital programmer. Does the same job just may have more flexibility on number of settings. We can set ours for weekends differently to the weekdays.
I've seen a few of the new digital programmers, but I have no idea how to work them. The concept is logical enough, you have a digital clock with a memory chip that contains as many on-off switches as you want, but getting anything digital to do what you want is another matter entirely...0 -
The important thing is the thermostat which actually give the temperature, not just on/off. This allows the programmer to heat the house to different temperatures for different times of the day. Without an analogue (non-relay) thermostat, you might as well use a mechanical timer with two pairs of on/off.0
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Madpiano,
You don't live in ex-MOD housing do you ? The reason my hot water is currently on all the time is that the timer dial is knackered. However, my bathroom radiator is also on permanently. Could it be the timer control switch(es)? Mine doesn't have on/off for the water and heating but 'Hot water priority' and 'Heating priority' which would suggest that both are on subject to the timer ?0
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