My House is taking ages to heat up

Ms01ma

Right I’m pretty clueless when it comes to stuff like this

However my house is taking ages to heat up (tonight 2.4 hours to go from 17 to 19)

It’s a big house (250m2) 4 bed detached from 1910, massive ceilings and massive rooms (so I do understand it’s always going to take a while / cost a fortune)

I have a baxi megaflo 28 boiler with hive heating. thermostat is in the hallway

I’m using 33000 kWh of gas a year and only ever have the thermostat to 19/19.5

Any suggestions welcome thanks

getmore4less

Check the boiler temp settings to make sure you have the higher settings for the cooler months.

Knob 17 in the manual.

Is the hall warming up first?

sevenhills

Just looking at the clock temperture gauge in the corner of my room, its showing 15.6c
I have only had the heating on for an hour or so, the CH thermostat is set at 25c

RelievedSheff

Unfortunately with a big old house you are never going to get it toasty warm. We have previously rented a large 1890 villa and it was never warm in winter despite a massive gas bill as the boiler valiantly tried to achieve the impossible.

Does your house have any insulation? If not it would be worth looking into this.

EssexExile

I have a house about that size, 1950s, I use about the same amount of gas, have a boiler a little bigger, yes it takes hours to warm up!

tacpot12

I would suggest you need a heating engineer to check how the system is operating and whether he radiators are big enough, but before you get them to come, I would check that you have no cold draughts in the house. So check all the windows and doors to see where cold draughts are coming in and block these off.

RelievedSheff

You just have to accept that you are trying to heat a much bigger space than a modern build house and on top of that the construction of the house is such that a lot of that heat generated leaks out.

This is one of the reasons we discounted older houses. Our last house a 1930s semi was much better than the old villa at keeping in the heat and was a warm home, but even that was not a patch on the new build we have now bought. This house uses hardly any gas at all and is super warm. In fact it can be a tad too warm at times!

coffeehound

Could you start using a fireplace to have a fire and really bang some heat into the building on cold evenings?

TELLIT01

Also worth checking that all radiators are getting completely hot. Cold at the top indicates air in the radiator and cold at the bottom suggests a buildup of crud (technical term) in the radiator. Air is easy to remove by bleeding the radiator, crud will at best require the radiator to be flushed through and at worst the whole system to be done.

G_M

Look into insulation.
No air in top of rads (feel them).
No gunk in bottom of rads (feel them).
Boiler set at high temp so circulating water is toasty hot.
If the hall heats up well (OK, better), the stat in the hall might be turning the heating off.

Double glazing.

ka7e

High heating bills were one of the main reasons we sold our Victorian semi this year. We had a new boiler and double curtains on the downstairs windows - not double glazed as they were huge. It took 4-5 hours to get it comfortable from a 16 degree start and it cooled very rapidly when the heating went off. Bills for gas and electric were about £1800 p.a. even though we tried to be pretty frugal and wore several layers indoors!