Smart heating

badger09

Astria said:

Evan3020 said:

How would it not help?, not prejudging as i know nothing about the condition but putting on warm clothing seems a good idea rather than cranking up the CH.

I have Reynaud's, the doctor suggested wearing gloves or thicker socks when my hands and/or feet turn into ice blocks. I found that putting on more clothing generally (eg, a jumper) even though the rest of my body doesn't feel cold works much better. Previous to that I was cranking the heating up and sitting on my hands!

Me too. 

I bought one of these last year (Aldi) paid about £18 IIRC

It was a lifesaver. Warmer clothes, a rug & this, meant I didn’t need to heat north facing study/bedroom where I spend a lot of time😊

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/225072400075?var=0&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=710-53481-19255-0&campid=5338749389&toolid=20006&customid=GB_26395_225072400075.139884666449~1586120607808-g_EAIaIQobChMIzJPm0cql-QIVjMLCBB2htgwHEAQYFCABEgIerfD_BwE

Buerer is a well known brand, but I’m very happy with mine.  

[Deleted User]

Petriix said:

The only way to manually replicate the energy savings of smart TRVs is to run around the house turning individual TRVs up and down at various points - including 30 minutes before you get up etc.

The idea is to avoid unnecessarily heating empty rooms. When configured properly, it would be pretty much impossible to be as efficient with dumb TRVs unless you simply leave the radiators off. 

A house is an insulated box. Not heating unused rooms seems to be a great idea but I know from 4 years of experience with Evohome that leaving rooms without any heating can bring its own problems: not least, condensation and mould. Like many, we concluded that unused rooms need to be heated up to 13C per day.

The other issue is that people can end up pumping the heat from a 24kW boiler or bigger into a single radiator if matters are taken too far. All modern boilers will modulate down; however, if you listen to the boiler in home where all the radiators are turned down you will hear frequent boiler cycling which adds to the risk of premature boiler failure.

Opentherm was once described to me as a means of modulating boiler demand such that if the boiler was driving through a city all the traffic lights would be on green. Sadly, even Opentherm controls cannot cope with a boiler where the heating demand is below the lowest boiler setting. The boiler just cycles.

Alnat1

As my heating goes off an hour before I go to bed, I could adjust any TRVs in the evening to what they need to be in the morning.

I actually don't change any TRVs, unused rooms on *, utility/cloakroom on 1, bedroom/bathroom/kitchen on 2, living room on full. I then use room thermostat in living room which is set to 16.5C for morning, 17.5C from 2pm and I turn it up a bit manually if chilly later. 

matelodave

As we've got a heatpump driving underfloor heating there's no point in having a very sophisticated control system because the response times are very slow. The heatpump has weather compensation and although we do have programmable stats in each room (they work like TRVs to control the floor loops) they dont really help.

We are better off, letting the system run under control of the weather compensation which controls the flow temp through the floor loops according to the outside temp and to balance the heat loss.

 As said above shutting off too many loops just causes the pump to cycle on and off. If we close it off overnight it can take several hours to bring the rooms back up to temperature so I just reduce the flow temp by three degrees.  I can make it heat quicker by increasing the flow temp but the efficiency drops dramatically (its reckoned to be by about 2.5% per degree) and the running costs increase as the heatpump has to work harder. We do have the advantage of being home all day so we can have a reasonably even temp rather than blasting it out for a couple of hours in the mornings and evenings

I suspect that a lot of people could improve their system efficiency by running the boiler flow temp a bit lower for longer - a bit like cruising on a motorway at 50-55mph rather than keep blatting up to 80 and then down to 50 every time you meet traffic. It may take a bit longer to get there but you'll use a lot less fuel and there's less stress on the car.

As the OP mentioned Hive, I'd have second thoughts about the way they've been treating their customers - they are closing down some of their services - flood alarms and now cameras so I'd be a bit wary about spending lots of money on a system that may or may not continue to operate into the distant future.

Unfortunately once you are tied into a remote operation like Hive or any other on-line or cloud based system, they've got you over a barrel. I'd rather have a system that was fully self contained and didn't rely on a third party to keep it operational

Petriix

[Deleted User] said:

Petriix said:

The only way to manually replicate the energy savings of smart TRVs is to run around the house turning individual TRVs up and down at various points - including 30 minutes before you get up etc.

The idea is to avoid unnecessarily heating empty rooms. When configured properly, it would be pretty much impossible to be as efficient with dumb TRVs unless you simply leave the radiators off. 

A house is an insulated box. Not heating unused rooms seems to be a great idea but I know from 4 years of experience with Evohome that leaving rooms without any heating can bring its own problems: not least, condensation and mould. Like many, we concluded that unused rooms need to be heated up to 13C per day.

The other issue is that people can end up pumping the heat from a 24kW boiler or bigger into a single radiator if matters are taken too far. All modern boilers will modulate down; however, if you listen to the boiler in home where all the radiators are turned down you will hear frequent boiler cycling which adds to the risk of premature boiler failure.

Opentherm was once described to me as a means of modulating boiler demand such that if the boiler was driving through a city all the traffic lights would be on green. Sadly, even Opentherm controls cannot cope with a boiler where the heating demand is below the lowest boiler setting. The boiler just cycles.

You're assuming the 'unused rooms' are permanently so. I'm talking about the bedrooms which, in my home, only require a short blast before getting out of or into bed. At the moment I leave those radiators on a medium setting all the time because it's too much effort to go around changing the settings multiple times per day.

There would be no issues with those rooms going cold throughout the day, it would just waste a bit less heat to the outside world. However, the savings would need to be significant to recoup the purchase price of the smart TRVs compatible with my Netatmo thermostat. £70 each last time I checked.

With escalating gas prices, it's not beyond credibility that it might make financial sense at some point. Last year my total heating bill was ~ £300. If prices have increased by 300% and we have a cold winter, £1500 is not impossible. A 10% saving would pay for two smart TRVs in year 1 or 4 over 2 years.

However, for this winter I'll be trying to limit the amount of gas heating and maximise burning scavenged wood. It's incredibly hard to work out the economics with so many variables. 

Alnat1

Just for info

When the room drops below these temperatures, the TRV will allow hot water to flow into the radiator:

• 0 = Off.
• * = 7°C.
• 1 = 10°C.
• 2 = 15°C.
• 3 = 20°C.
• 4 = 25°C.
• 5 = 30°C.

BUFF

Alnat1 said:

Just for info

When the room drops below these temperatures, the TRV will allow hot water to flow into the radiator:

• 0 = Off.
• * = 7°C.
• 1 = 10°C.
• 2 = 15°C.
• 3 = 20°C.
• 4 = 25°C.
• 5 = 30°C.

Varies depending upon the manufacturer. The one indisputable benefit of eTRVs is that they should allow for more precise temperature setting than your typical wax or liquid sensor. But you can get that without going to a full "smart" TRV (at greater cost) - it just won't be able to bring your boiler on with a call for heat as a "smart" system could.

Petriix said:

 It's incredibly hard to work out the economics with so many variables. 

Agreed, the thing is that what best suits each individual house & person is going to vary according to the fabric of the building & the schedule of the occupants (as well as the occupants' tolerance for cold). Unfortunately there is no 1 universal solution (some general guidelines though but even those will vary according to the aforementioned) for everybody.

Toonartist

Another Taco user here. We have the main thermostat but also smart thermostats on the radiators.

What this means for us is we no longer have to heat the entire house when we want to use the office (or go around turning off all the valves manually.)

We turn off the heating while we're out, and rather than use the geo feature, just turn it on when we're 10-20s away from home. If we open a window in a room that a radiator happens to be on, the system turns off the radiator so we're not wasting energy out the window.

We've been very happy with Tado but there are other options you could look at that do a similar thing. 

Toonartist

Edit above, "Another Tado User"