How do you manage your heating this time of year?

Martyn1981

Just (only just) about managing with GCH off this month, but small ASHP (3.5kW) running all day off PV generation.

Noticed neighbour varying between GCH (boiler vent is visible from kitchen window) and opening french windows!

joefizz

mmmmikey wrote: »

Thinking of an IR ceiling panel,

Ohhhh, I like that idea. I have an IR sauna and never thought about using the panels. I see the german ones are white and as you say ceiling mountable.... hmmm not for living room for me but for directly over the bed.... Im not sure on being used to heat the space though, it tends to heat things rather than spaces (hence ideal for the sauna).


As with the rest, have posted on the battery thread, just installed ashp for shoulder through summer but cant do without oil heating the rest of the time.
Work from home so bought a greenhouse type heating tube (90W) for under my desk in the office in the morning in winter (equipment usually brings the temp of the room up to 21-22 without heating most days).

Bought a controllable one, more than sufficient for some localised heat.


My living room is probably similar to yours, although I do have the option of the solid fuel fire/heater I tend to just use another jumper and use the last of the panasonic plasmas that give out 200W of heat as losses to take the chill off the room ;-)


Wait and see what your usage is like with the batteries, you could find you have spare capacity in the morning for a timed local heater easily enough, even if it just gets the temperature up to 'tolerable' ;-)
On the sofar/pylontech system I have you can set the timings for E7 so if you find you just need an extra kw then just take that from E7. I can usually see what Im going to need for the next few days just from the weather forecast! I know if the batteries are going to be charged by 10am or if I need the batteries to last 3 days (like this week) and use accordingly (washing machine and dishwasher going on tomorrow..)

michaels

Our boiler has weather comp control, set peak and off peak temp and hours and leave it to get on with it throughout the year.

Ectophile

I do it the same as I do any other time of year. The heating is on a timer and a thermostat. I just leave those to get on with it 365 days a year.


There's no need to adjust anything. If it's cold, the heating comes on. if it's warm, it doesn't.

mmmmikey

A fair spread of answers, many thanks to all who have posted. So it looks like a lot (most?) of you have heating controls that work to your satisfaction, whereas some are tinkering a bit for comfort and/or economy. And a few potential marital issues

Always interesting to see what others are doing before you start spending money, a few ideas there for me to follow up on.....

Thanks again, Mike

Coastalwatch

mmmmikey wrote: »

Hi - the title says it all - how do you manage your heating this time of year with cold, frosty morning and warm sunny days?
Do you leave the thermostat to care of things for you (and does it work?) or do you have to keep fiddling with it to stop the house getting too hot in the day or too cold at night? Do you turn your main heating off and use something else, and is this to reduce cost or keep the temperature more stable (or both)?
My solution of combining the storage heaters with a portable heater and opening the windows when needed works and is cheap but it's certainly wasteful and there's scope for both saving and controlling the temperature better. I have a few ideas but I'd be interested to know what others are doing....
Thanks, Mike

Hi Mike, I originally thought what a strange question, surely everybody just leaves the thermostat to take care of it. Then I noticed you're suffering from night storage heaters.;)
If they were mine it wouldn't be a case of how can I best work with them, but how soon can I replace them with a better alternative!
If you're fitting an Air to Air Heat Pump then you'll soon find how efficient and effective they can be. They are certainly more cost effective on standard rate leccy than night storage heaters on E7 and just immensely more flexible.
We had two such items fitted last year to replace the majority of the heating supplied by GCH. Since December they've supplied the majority of heating we've needed, using GCH only to heat a couple of rooms(kitchen and en-suite) not reached by the ASHP's when outside temps dipped below freezing. I know the seasons vary considerably year to year and last winter was a cold one compared to this. However, in that period we've consumed 3855kWh's less gas while increasing leccy by 532kWh's. I've only recorded monthly figures for the last three years and from these can see that monthly consumption, year to year, varies by upto a factor of 2:1. So maybe the actual amount of gas saved is just half the figure used as a comparision.
I've no way of knowing how much higher the leccy consumption would have been without the Solar panels but the time period does cover the darkest months with the lowest generation.
As a further complication we were also charging the EV during this period, which we didn't have prior to last June!


Food for thought perhaps.;)

mmmmikey

Coastalwatch wrote: »

Then I noticed you're suffering from night storage heaters.

Interesting post, thanks.

I actually only put the storage heaters in last year and overall I've been very pleased with them. I was a bit reticent about installing them having read lots of comments along the line of yours, which certainly seems to represent the majority view. But on paper it looked like a more cost effective option than gas for me, and for environmental reasons I wanted to avoid gas. So I hedged my bets and bought reconditioned storage heaters for less than the price I got for selling the Fischer Future heaters I took out (and I've still got a couple of those left to sell).

I did consider ASHPs before deciding on the storage heaters, but ruled out having more than one because of limitations around the placement of the outside units. The installation of the ASHP now has been driven more by wanting summer aircon (seems extravagant, but I have a medication regime that makes hot, sticky nights a nightmare), although having got one (installation in progress) it would be daft not to use it for heating as well. I was also nervous about COP ratings in the dead of winter when I'd be using them the most.

Other than fiddling with the controls to find the right starting point settings when the heating season started, the storage heaters have kept the bungalow to a remarkably consistent 20 degrees +/- 1 degree with minimal intervention until the last couple of weeks. I was expecting a fair bit of effort to get them right so I have temperature data loggers in all the rooms. In reality they've pretty much just worked and I can see this with confidence from the data loggers so I'm not kidding myself. The costs are absolutely in line with expectations. I've more or less halved my electricty bill, and when you factor in the additonal standing charge for gas, annual maintenance and ongoing repairs I'm confident I made a decent choice.

The problem I'm having now is no worse than it was than I had in my last house with gas central heating - liveable with but just not as efficient as I would like (I'm really into the realms of fine-tuning here). In the last house, I found that the variation in temperature throughout the house this time of year was so different from room to room the controls never really worked well, with quite big lags leading to the house getting too warm, so turning the thermostat down and then finding it too cold in the evening. I posted the question to see how common this was and to see if it threw up any ideas that I hadn't thought of, as is so often the way. It seems that one or two people may have this kind of issue, but almost certainly a minority.

Coming back to my current situation, I had always expected to add a bit of instant heating here and there (very much the norm with storage heaters) but thought I would experiment with portable heaters first. They've worked OKish but a bit wasteful, and I'm doing loads of house stuff at the moment (hence the ASHP, battery, thermal store & numerous posts) so now's the right time to do something a bit more permanent than the portable heaters for the shoulder months going forward. I also have the opportunity to use solar energy stored in the battery.

I'm not disgareeing with anything you've said, by the way, judging by comments on this and other forums you're in the majority when it comes to not liking storage heaters and having central heating controls that work well. And thanks very much for the detailed post. It's always good to hear what people have to say as a sanity check on your own reasoning.

Thanks again, Mike

melanzana

I just turn heat on if I feel cold. What's the problem?

It is timed for evening and morning, but since I have hung up my boots I budgeted for extras. So that's the way I work it.

Cannot abide being too cold, or too hot either.

According to my weather station it is 6.9d outdoors, but 21.6 indoors and that is with no heat on since 9pm. Residual I suppose.

Electric underblanket beckons later too. Bliss.

Coastalwatch

mmmmikey wrote: »

I actually only put the storage heaters in last year and overall I've been very pleased with them.

Ooops! Sorry Mike, not very diplomatic of me, so apologies there.
Glad to learn you've been pleased with them otherwise and they certainly seem to be keeping temps very stable which I suspect the ASHP would do well to replicate. It will be interesting to see how it performs for you once up and running.


Started stripping out the airing cupboard today, will make a start on the bathroom tomorrow to get the plumbing all sorted and in situ ready to receive the thermal store. Still debating whether to go for the 160 which is adequate for the two of us, or the 210 to cater for the long winter days of iffy generation!

Zarch

Whilst the Nest reads the temperature in the Hallway, I too had issues where different rooms fluctuated.

Yes, you can tinker with TRV but it was like shifting sand without knowing the temperature in each room.

So I bought a number of these bluetooth temperature senors and put them in each room.

https://www.banggood.com/New-Arrival-Original-Xiaomi-Aqara-Intelligent-Smart-Home-Temperature-Humidity-Sensor-Set-White-p-1148666.html?rmmds=detail-top-buytogether-auto__3&cur_warehouse=CN

This has allowed me to tinker with the TRVs so that the whole house is a bit more balanced and consistent versus what the Nest is reading in the hallway.

Whilst not as perfect as having the likes of Honeywell 'smart' TRVs, its been a good little exercise.

You can read more about setting the chinese sensors up here.
https://smarthomehobby.com/2017/10/21/up-your-smart-home-game-on-the-cheap-with-the-xiaomi-aqara-gateway-home-assistant/