Meter Reading

jbuchanangb

The meter you have IS a smart meter. One giveaway is the sticker with the SIM number and the phone number! An IHD is an In Home Device, a gadget which normally accompanies a smart meter and uses a special wifi technology to enable you to read the meter remotely and monitor your current consumption, and analyse day by day or week by week etc.

The Horstmann device is a 2 zone central heating controller, which one would expect to be used to set times for switching on and off the central heating for two defined zones in a property. No doubt you have discovered that the lower section is a flap that comes down to enable you to use the menus to set the desired schedules.

It should be wired to the control circuits for underfloor heating. But you are saying that the heating circuits operate independently of the controller. You may need to get an expert in to look at how things are wired up.

You have misunderstood the remark about the meter reading. What @Robin9 said is that since 20/5/16 the property has used 41898 kWh. The other reading (12648) was the reading on the meter which was removed at that time.

Reed_Richards

In the old days you would have a central heating programmer that would control when your heating turned on and off and a thermostat somewhere in the house with a dial that you could rotate to set the temperature you wanted.  Then programmable thermostats became affordable.  If all your rooms have thermostats that are programmable (so you can control how the set temperature varies during each day) then a centralised programmer like your Horstmann model is redundant.  Perhaps that is why it does not seem to do anything - because it's control function has been bypassed.

matelodave

As that programmer has contacts rated at 3amps it unlikely to be controlling any sort of underfloor heating or hot water cylinders unless there's a big contactor somewhere. 3 amps at 250 volts is 750watts, it would evaporate itself if it tried to switch a 3kw immersion and I suspect that any sort of underfloor system would be dissipating around 1 kw or more per room

Lets see what the thermostats look like. U/F heating stats are usually rated at 3kw.

I'm a bit intrigued by the configuration - if the u/f heating is connected to the two rings, where are your 13 amp sockets connected. It's a bit of an unsual configuration if they are sharing the same rings as the heating system.

I'm not up to speed on house wiring anymore but I would have expected the sockets to be on their own ring with each floor circuit connected back to the fuse board as a spur (similar to the way storage heaters were installed or even to a separate board so it could be separarately fed from a timed off peak supply. 

brewerdave

Reed_Richards said:

In the old days you would have a central heating programmer that would control when your heating turned on and off and a thermostat somewhere in the house with a dial that you could rotate to set the temperature you wanted.  Then programmable thermostats became affordable.  If all your rooms have thermostats that are programmable (so you can control how the set temperature varies during each day) then a centralised programmer like your Horstmann model is redundant.  Perhaps that is why it does not seem to do anything - because it's control function has been bypassed.

Not so much of the "old" - I'm still using mine !   

ZacharyJohn

Thanks guys.

I'm pretty comfortable with how the programmer works, it's just that it doesn't seem to be doing anything. In fact, I've had it turned off for the past couple of days and nothing has changed with the heating at all - it turns on and off with each individual thermostat exactly as it did before.

@jbuchanangb do I have to buy this IHD separately to read the meter remotely or something? And thanks for the clarification about the previous meter reading.

@Reed_Richards I don't think my thermostats are programmable, they're just simple dials to set the temperature.

@matelodave sorry, I have no idea about this stuff - what are 13 amp sockets? I've posted a picture of the bedroom thermostat below (they're all the same, each one with it's own switch directly below).

I think the heating is supposed to come on whenever a room temp falls below whatever temp that specific room thermostat is set to, but the heating doesn't seem to come on unless the thermostat is turned up to at least 25 degrees Celsius. It could be freezing in the room, but if the thermostat is anything below 25, the heating won't come on. Is that normal? The whole thing's a bit of a nightmare at the moment.

Gerry1

ZacharyJohn said:

what are 13 amp sockets?

They look this this...

Reed_Richards

So you have the switch for your underfloor heating just next to (13 amp double) electrical sockets.  If it's always like that in every room then that might imply that the underfloor heating is wired as a spur off your ring main which is why, so far, we have failed to find a dedicated fuse.

That's a basic non-programmable thermostat up on the wall.  You can usually hear a click as you turn the dial past the actual room temperature and it activates the heating.  If you have to turn them up to 25 to get the heating to run on at all then that is NOT normal; something is wrong.  

macman

What operating temp are you wanting to set?
171kWh over 3 days with the heating and DHW on in cold weather does not seem excessive to me, that's maybe £6 per day. So £180pm, but remember that is only for the coldest few months the heating is on. Over a full year, that might average down to maybe £100pm, which with all-electric heating on single rate is very reasonable.

thorganby

ZacharyJohn said:

The underfloor heating itself is controlled by a thermostat in each room (each with its own switch) and a Horstmann central heating programmer. I assumed this programmer overrode all individual thermostats but when I was playing around with it last night and had the programmer turned to OFF, I was still able to turn the heating up and down (a red light on each thermostat shows when the heating is on and not yet at full temp). I am therefore not entirely sure what the programmer does, and in fact whether or not it controls the water as well.

I'm pretty comfortable with how the programmer works, it's just that it doesn't seem to be doing anything. In fact, I've had it turned off for the past couple of days and nothing has changed with the heating at all - it turns on and off with each individual thermostat exactly as it did before.

The programmer doesn't seem to be doing anything because you don't understand that it is not an ON/OFF programmer with two zones but a COMFORT/SETBACK programmer for each zone. The programmer is controlling underfloor heating only and not your hot water heating.

Each underfloor heating zone will normally be ON continuously 24/7 with the desired COMFORT temperature set on the individual room stats if required in that room.  The dual zone programmer defines the SETBACK times for each zone and your room stats have a fixed SETBACK temperature of 5 degrees C. e.g. if you set the COMFORT temperature on the stat to 21 C, the programmed SETBACK temperature will be 21 - 5 = 16 C.

Single rate electric heating is expensive and it will be even more expensive if you don't understand how to use it correctly, so move before next winter to a place with gas heating!

matelodave

The thermostat shown is rated at 16amps, so designed to control underfllor heating. I suspect that Reed-Richards is correct insofar as the heating is isolated by the separate wall switch adjacent to the thermostat and is in fact just a spur or even routed via the 13a ring main.

As Thorganby says, it looks like the programmer is configured to operate the "setback" function on the thermostat rather than turn the heating on and off. https://ojelectronics.com/floorheating/products/on-off-thermostat-mtu2/ so the only way to shut it down is to either turn the stat right down or switch off at the wall switch.

As said above, single rate leccy for a heating system like yours is going to be very expensive and it sounds as though your system may not be suitable for use with E7