Can an 'intelligent' heating system be retrofitted to a house with oil-fired boiler?

Gareth_Davies_2

Ah - got it. Things have changed so much since we installed the original system in 1977!

System

Take a look at this forum:

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?13-Heating-Control

Evohome can be as much or as little as you need. The basic controller offers as much as the HIVE system with the potential to use wifi And conventional TRVs.

Gareth_Davies_2

reeac wrote: »

Our 18 year old oil fired system with one room stat. and TRVs works fine for us ....and I would have forgone the TRVs if I'd had the opportunity. Our room stat is mains powered so no multiple battery changes every 6 months.

Thanks for this. What I suppose I'm looking for is a system that's a bit less hit-and-miss than the one we've presently got, which is that each radiator has a conventional mechanical TRV on it - and that's it. With numbers from 0 to 10 on the rotary part of the TRVs it's difficult to select a temperature for the room, and in any case I'd much prefer the thermostat to be somewhere else in the room, not physically part of the radiator itself, and, yes, with some sort of display in degrees rather than non-specific numerals. But the total Evohome package is much too sophisticated, and I doubt whether it would work anyway (assuming it sends wireless signals all over the place) in our house, which has stone walls up to a metre thick.

Smiley_Dan

Yes, we have Heat Genius on an oil boiler.

One word of warning though. Oil boilers, unlike gas, do not modulate. This means some of the logic inside these systems may need configuring. For example, these systems tend to be very good at avoiding overheating by closing TRVs in a more controlled way that conventional systems.

That's fine for gas boilers, but when you have a boiler that doesn't modulate it means there's more short cycling as the system slowly closes in on its target temperature. This means a little more fuel and a fair bit more electricity wasted (boilers are non-trivial users of electricity).

The solution (on HG at least) is an override that you can place on individual radiators to actually allow the TRVs to heat a little higher - the room thermostat then senses the lower, desired temperature is reached and switches the boiler off. It's a bit like using the mass of your house as a buffer (which is another solution, but more expensive). It only works if your house is not-profligate heat loss.

Gareth_Davies_2

This is extremely useful. Many thanks.