Room Thermostat installation charge

Smimsie

Hello, first post so sorry if this isn't the right place.

I've recently had a garden building constructed to house my piano. It is heated by a radiator powered by the household combi boiler. The plumber has put a valve underneath the boiler so I can turn it to either heat just the garden room or to heat both the garden room and the house. Wiring has been put in place from the house to the garden room for a wall thermostat, but no thermostat has been installed. I would like to have a thermostat installed that would control the heating system but the plumber has told me that he can't do that without entirely separating the heating system into two separate zones - i.e. I can have the boiler heating both the house and the garden room but not have it controlled by a thermostat, due to building regs. This doesn't really make sense to me - I can't see how it could be within building regs now but not if the thermostat is installed. The plumber wants to charge me over £500 to separate the heating into zones.

If anybody knows anything about heating zones, thermostats, plumbers charges or building regs, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks in advance for any help.

matelodave

A lot more information about your specific system and requirement is needed

What are you trying to achieve - heating the room independently from the house (ie cold house, hot room) or just on and off when the house is being heated but possibly not all the time the house heating is on.

What sort of valve has he fitted to divert the flow - manual or electrically operated. Is it a three port valve (ie one with three pipes going to it) or just basic radiator valves on the flow and return.

Just turning the room radiator on and off is easy and you could get a programmable thermostatic radiator valve to do the job.

However trying to integrate it into a separate zone so that it works independently from the main heating is a bit more difficult and would cost more money.

System

You might do better posting here:

https://www.diynot.com/diy/forums/plumbing/

A lot of the contributors are plumbers/heating engineers.

Smimsie

Thank you for your reply I would like to leave the valve open so that the boiler is heating both the house and the garden room, but have the whole thing treated as a single zone and controlled by a thermostat in the garden room. So at the moment, I can leave the valve open and have both the house and garden room heated, but switching the heating on or off has to be done manually at the boiler. I am being told that keeping this setup but having the heating switched on or off by a thermostat is against building regs, which doesn't make sense to me. I could see that it might have to be two zones as there are effectively two separate buildings, but not why it only has to be two zones if there is a thermostat and can be one zone without a thermostat /confused.

Smimsie

Thank you for the suggestion, I will post there

matelodave

If that's the case then the obvious answer is to wire (or get a wireless one) to replace the one thats inside the house.

Get an electrictian to do it as he probably wont be bound by strict interpretation of the building regs.

AndyPK

If it were me I would have the boiler controlled by the house thermostat and the outbuilding heated whenever the house called for heat.


The outbuilding may not get hot enough, but it will have some heat.
Would that satify you?


picture of valve would help

Smimsie

The house doesn't have a thermostat - just a temperature setting on the boiler. It is more important to have the correct temperature in the garden room than in the house tbh which is why I wanted a thermostat there. As a new user on this forum, I don't have permission to link to a pic. thanks for your help!

ianto11

If you have a heating controller CH/HW that controls your boiler on a timer you can swap them out with a smart thermostat.

I have the Tado smart stat with extension kit, the extension kit is a direct replacement for a standard heating controller (Danfoss etc). You then have the smart stat which is wireless and can be sited anywhere