Energy myth-busting: Is it cheaper to have heating on all day?
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Both OH and I mostly work from home, so heating in all the time seems to be okay for us then. :beer:
And then at night we may be up seeing to our daughter, so keeping it warm is important then too.
One thing to bear in mind is how cold it feels. If my heating comes on at specific times of the day (currently 6am to 10am and 3pm to 11pm) my lovely wife will pushes the main thermostat up to 25c when it comes on and that is where it will stay for the rest of the evening because she carries that feeling of waking up to a cold house. If I leave the heating on constant at 18C overnight, the whole house feels warmer but the thermostat never goes up over 21C then. When we do this we also turn the upstairs radiators right down as the warmth from downstairs is always flowing up.
Some of our friends have electric underfloor heating and, while it is expensive to run, they rarely put the thermostat up beyond 18C. Their house is always on the comfortable side of cool. As opposed to ours where our feet are cool and the ceiling area is very warm with the middle bit reasonably comfortable. Low speed ceiling fans, incidentally, are a great way of distributing the warm air in winter as well as for cooling in the summer months. Not that I can remember the last summer we had.
I should have said my broadband is with o2 on the LLU network so no line management. And your right, as i said these savings are tiny when compared to the electric heating, tumble driers etc.
A. An airer is better because tumble dryers use a lot of energy. Try timing it so you put your washing out on a clothes horse during thehours your heating comes on. Normally, that way you wouldn't use any more energy.
This is nonsense. The Energy Saving Trust can't change the laws of physics:
heat lost=heat gained
If people have their heating on, the implication is that it is cold outside, so they will have their windows mainly shut. The energy to dry clothes comes from the central heating, which has heated the air. The heat in the air in turn then dries the clothes by gradually changing the state of the water in the clothes from liquid water to water vapour by absorption of latent heat from the air by the water molecules, which is now ‘locked’ in the water vapour molecules. However, an increase in air humidity is undesirable, as it will result in condensation, so people then increase the amount of ventilation to get rid of it, by opening the windows, letting heat out. This involves the escape not only of some of the water vapour molecules carrying their latent heat (i.e. the heat actually used to dry the clothes) but also other warm air. The only way round this would be to have a ‘whole house ventilation system’ in which all windows are kept closed and ventilation is performed mechanically using a heat exchanger to capture the heat in the moist air being vented to the outside. Such systems are now available.
The energy used by a tumble drier has to be balanced against the energy lost by increasing the ventilation when drying clothes indoors. Obviously this depends on the outside air temperature, but the energy loss is likely to increase as the outside temperature decreases.The alternative is unacceptable levels of condensation, the long-term consequences of which also have energy implications, as well as other disadvantages. It is possible that when it is very cold outside, it is more energy efficient(without increasing condensation levels) to keep the windows closed and dry clothes with a tumble drier.
The response ‘that way you wouldn’t use more energy’ is incorrect. However, for most people it would be true to say that in the cost would be less because most people would have a combination of gas central heating and an electric tumble drier and gas is significantly cheaper than electricity.
It's interested that people are often happy to have their house around 15C in the autumn, but as soon as the frost starts to bite they feel 25C is needed, as though it's suddenly necessary for temperatures to be the same as the height of summer.
Good point about the ceiling fans too - getting the heat where it's needed is half the battle.
A modern digital programmer with an optimiser function will do this automatically for you. and would pay for itself in a few weeks compared to turning the stat up and/or leaving the CH on all night when heat loss is at it's highest.
The logic is that leaving the heating on 24/7 but controlled by a thermostat and turned down low overnight or when away from home CAN be as cheap as turning the heating on and off with a timer twice a day BECAUSE it takes an ENORMOUS amount of energy to reheat the fabric of a house that has been allowed to completely cool down. This will be less of an issue where the house is extremely well insulated and will be even more likely if its an old house with solid walls.
The other thing that people fail to recognise is the comfort factor. If heating only twice per day the fabric of the house will never get fully warm ..... you are essentially just reheating the air inside the house .... and it will never feel quite as cosy as when you heat 24/7.
It WILL almost certainly cost a little more to keep the heating on 24/7 - but not as much as many folk think. If you heat from say 7.00am - 9.00am then from 5.00pm - 11.00pm this will cost WAY more than a third as much as leaving the heating on 24/7.
Life's too short to be cold - and I know what I'm gonna continue to do!
It's a bit like the "where should I site the radiators" argument. The most EFFICIENT place to site them is on internal walls - but the way to be the most comfortable is to site them under a window. Guess where mine are!