Multiple thermostats possible?

keith969

You can fit as many or as few TRV's as you like, with the exception that at least 1 must be fully open to allow flow round the loop if all others are shut off. Commonly bathroom rads/towel rails are not fitted with TRVs for this purpose.

I tend to have mine full on downstairs and turned down for the upstairs - dont want the bedrooms to be so warm, and heat rises.

ManuelG

Another vote for TRVs here. My thermostat's near the front door so is set to something daft like 16 degrees (it's naturally cooler in that space then the rest of the house bar the attic!). This keeps the living room more than warm however, the kitchen and my bedroom have the TRVs turned down to keep the rooms ambient without wasting power, and the spare bedroom has the radiator turned way low down to keep it above freezing, with the chance to boost it when I use it as an office when working from home.

Works fine, and they were cheap to fit. The gasman did them when he did the service on the boiler, and the price was v reasonable.

barnaclebill

Before we bought this house we rented a few houses, one had underfloor heating and a thermostat in every room, in the garage was the boiler and the row of solenoid valves that lead the water to each room, it was a pain at first to adjust all the thermostats to the day/time/ hour.
This was expensive but I am sure you could fit a solenoid valve to each of the rooms you want to control with a thermostat in those rooms and if any required heat the boiler would start and only heat that room plus the rooms with TRV's that were open and the bathroom as already posted

nwc389

Hi we had a similar set up to the OP . Main thermostat in the living room so as soon as the four of us were in there with the doors shut it would get warm and shut the system down so our bedroom which was built over the garage would be freezing.
We had TRVs fitted to all rooms apart from bathrooms and the radiator at the bottom of the stairs and took the thermostat away completely. We find this works a treat , bathrooms are lovely and warm , our bedroom can be kept at a comfortable temperature and the radiator in the smallest bedroom can be turned right down as it is a very warm room anyway.
I tend to adjust the TRVs as needed and find I can keep the house comfortable without it getting over warm.

fezster

andre_xs wrote: »

The reason is that currently we sometimes have the awkward situation (with only one thermostat in the living room) to heat up the childrens' bedrooms, we sometimes need to make it very warm in the living room for the heating to go on in the first place...

Best wishes,
Andre

This is fundamentally the problem with multiple thermostats, but a "single zone". There's no technical reason you can't have more than one thermostat, but it will control the entire heating system, which means your lounge will still get much warmer than the bedroom.

As has been said already, you need to firstly make sure your system is properly balanced, and therefore every room should (in theory) be roughly the same temperature. This is impossible in reality, but you want to try and get as close to it as possible.

Then you would adjust the TRV's to control how hot or cool you want individual rooms to be. You must ensure the room / hallway with the thermostat does not have a TRV, otherwise the thermostat will never be satisfied, as the radiator will cool down when the TRV kicks in.

Evohome (out of your budget I know) uses TRVs which can be programmed and controlled through an interface, allowing finer grain control. Essentially creating individual zones for every room.

System

This is something I have been looking at for my own house - I can't see of a reasonable way of achieving it without a decent investment.
I am considering the heat genius system which does similar to evohome as it's the only way I can see of achieving a system where you are not heating unused rooms all the time (or at least without running around opening and closing TRV's all the time.
But convenience comes at a cost! It might be ditched when I get the final confirmed quotes for my heating install!

Smiley_Dan

You can probably do it yourself if you are technically inclined. For instance, HG uses Danfoss TRVs utilising Z-Wave. The HG system is really located in a Raspberry Pi based control hub, which you could in theory build yourself. But it would take a lot of time and you obviously wouldn't have a polished "product".

System

That's interesting Dan, might look further into it... (Until the wife finds out anyway!)
I guess the software/app/ programming is the biggest hassle rather than the hardware but sure Google could help with that!