How to turn on central heating in one room only

abbas5001

Hi everyone,

Sorry this seems like a daft question but i want to find out how i can ensure the central heating goes on in one room only. Our living room is freezing in autumn and winter when we get up so i would like to have the central heating in that room come on say an hour before we get up. However, i am not sure how i would go about that. Currently our boiler is in the garage and has this control connected to it (). It is always on 'off' and we turn it to 'on' if we want the central heating on.  The radiators in the living room are fitted with radiator valves. We don't have any thermostats installed in the house

I am not sure if i need to upgrade to one of these Hive/Nest systems or install a smart thermostat or smart radiator valve. Would be grateful if someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks

grumbler

abbas5001 said:

I am not sure if i need to upgrade to one of these Hive/Nest systems or install a smart thermostat or smart radiator valve.

Do you have 'dumb' thermostatic valves on your radiators?

Bendy_House

Hi Abbas.

No idea what model controller that is, and the pic is too fuzzy to read any of the info on it. Does it have a model name anywhere?

And it would also help to build a picture if you tell us the make and model of your boiler. Is it a combi, or do you have a hot water cylinder?

Can you confirm, please - every time you want the CH on in the house, you need to go out to the garage and press a button? Good lawd.

And there is nothing in the house by which to set the temperature? So, how do regulate the house temp?

The radiator valves - are these thermostatic? Do they have large 'heads' with numbers, usually * to 5 on them?

In short, tho', to get what you want - the living room to be warm in the morning - you need a 'Programmable Thermostat'. This will be mounted on the wall, in probably the sitting room, and you can tell it what temp you want at what time. Eg, 20oC at 7am, followed by 14oC at 8am, back up to 20oC at 4pm, a touch higher to 21oC at 6pm, down to 14oC at 11pm etc etc.

This can be connected to the boiler wirelessly, so no need to run cables to the garage. The receiver will likely replace that unit in your pic.

(Whatever room the ProgStat goes in, the rads in there should be permanently open - the PS then does the controlling).

Ok, that is the starting point, and you can achieve that using a Hive or Nest or similar. You should be able to buy a Hive + receiver for, say, £50-60 on eBay if you take your time. A Hub will allow App control from your phone or PC, and that is a GREAT addition.

The neatest form of Hive is the 'Mini', and it's a wee cracker - BUT it needs the App for proper easy control. You should be able to pick up the full kit - Mini, Receiver & Hub for, ooh, around £65?

Ok, that will drag your CH into the 21st century. To then control individual rooms will require you to either manually turn on/off the rad valves in each room before you go to bed so they'll be at the correct temp setting in the morning when the HIve tells the boiler to come on, or else you'll need to invest in Smart rad valves - around £40-odd each? - that the Hive can then control individually. By the time you've done a few, the cost will have mounted up...

So, typically, folk have their heating set to go off at, say, 11pm, and back on at, ooh, 6am. What they need to do is to manually turn off the rads in their bedrooms during the day and evening, so they aren't being heated wastefully. A half or one hour before bedtime, each person needs to run to their room and turn their rads up to, say, 3. They will come on (provided the boiler is running, which it should be if it's cold), to get the room acceptable before bed, and they'll then go off at 11pm with the timed CH. The rads will still be at '3' in the morning, so when the boiler comes back on at the timed, say, 6am, the bedroom rads should come on too. Before the bedrooms are vacated, the occupant should turn their rads down to '*' which is 'frost' setting, so the rads remain off until required for the following evening, before-bedtime.

The same applies to all the rads in the house - if, say, the dining room isn't used during winter, then leave the rad in there permanently on '*' = frost. Any unused bedrooms? Ditto them. (But leave the windows of any unoccupied room on 'vent' setting, and the internal doors closed - that will prevent them from becoming damp.)

One wee complication. The Prog Room Stat will be the device which tells the boiler to come on and go off. The best place for this is probably the living room, as that's the most important room to have warm. When that room gets up to temp - say the 20oC set for early evening - the PS will tell the boiler to go off until the temperature drops below around 19.5, whereupon it'll tell it to come back on again. That's the basic principle. What it means, tho', is that when the boiler is 'off' - living room at 20oC - all the other rads in the house will be off too - they won't be getting hot water from the boiler. That is usually ok, but if the rads in the living room are more powerful than the other rads, then the living room will warm up faster - too fast - so the rest of the house won't get the chance to.

That make sense? If that turns out to be the case - ie if the sitting room is nicely warm and it tells the boiler to go off and the rest of the house is now cold - then the solution is to turn the rads in the sitting closed a wee bit so they aren't as 'powerful'. This is called 'balancing' the system, so that each rad heats up each room at roughly the same rate.

If you have App control, and someone starts shouting that their bedroom is freezing (say a child using it for homework), then you can quickly turn the heating up a notch using your phone, and this will get the boiler back on. You can then turn down a rad in the sitting room if that room is becoming too warm! It's all about learning what works for the family, and it should become 'normal'.

BUFF

The fact that your existing control has a clock in it & has Mode & Set buttons (sorry, the rest are too fuzzy)  suggests that it is a programmer. so ought to be usable to bring the system on & turn off at set times without you having to go to the garage.

Having said that you can almost certainly improve the efficency of your system & your comfort with new controls & without spending a lot of money (in fact with gas at 10p/kWh they could easily pay for themselves within a few years). More system information, as requested above by B-H would help.

If you are looking at Hive/Nest also have a look at Drayton Wiser & Tado.

fenwick458

depending on how many rads you have, the individual control could get expensive. Drayton wiser kit is £220 and then you'd need a load of extra TRV's. one for each radiator in the house, so at a guess another 6 TRV's would be in the region of £270, all plus installation if you couldn't do it yourself.
another option if you happen to have a freestanding oil filled radiator and a plug in timer would be to sit that in the living room and set it to come on 1 hour before, if it was 2kw then you'd expect to pay around 65p per day for that full hour. 
at todays prices you'd be able to do that for 770 days before it cost as much as the parts for the smart TRV's, and as you'd only need to use in the winter months,  assuming 150 days per year,  the cost of running the electric heater for 5 years is equal to the parts for a TRV system. 

Bendy_House

You absolutely SHOULD fit a wall thermostat in the house, Abbas. Even the most basic manual type will give you real-time control over your heating, which would be a major improvement on what you currently have.

And then each room can be controlled - again manually - by their individual rad valves.

That's the most basic setup, and you currently don't even have that.

Once the correct decision is made to fit a room stat, then it makes equal sense to make this a 'Programmable' type. That will almost certainly pay for itself within a year - I'd bet well within a year with energy prices increasing.

So now you've made the correct decision to fit a Prog Stat, I'd suggest it makes huge sense to go for a Smart type that you can also control by App. The flexibility of this is superb. Just last eve, on the first day our heating came on this year (set at a cool but adequate 18oC), once ensconced in front of t'tele with snug blanket, wife and two dawgs, I tapped my phone and knocked it back to 17.5oC. Heating off. 

Being programmable, it reverted to the programmed settings later on, so still came on for a short period this morning.

Today I'm going to fit the Hive Smart valve I bought several months ago. This is going on our bedroom rad, and will be set to take the chill off the air just before bed time, and ditto in the morning. So I won't have to manually turn the rad up and down myself  (if you forgot to do this, the bedroom would be heated when not used - which is silly). Since my wonderful design of rad cover doesn't allow access to the rad valve without it being removed each time, that's another reason...

'Wireless' should make the Prog Stat install a breeze, provided your garage isn't too far away from the Stat location in the house.

So, more info needed, Abbas.

EssexExile

It looks like a Salus, maybe an EP101, if that helps anyone.

knightstyle

Just thinking about all the great advice on here and I wonder how old the installation is?  Have you ever had it flushed through?  Worth doing occasionally, every 10 years IMO, 
Plus if the room is so cold where is it loosing heat?  Have you thought about extra/improving insulation?

theoretica

Bendy_House said:

You absolutely SHOULD fit a wall thermostat in the house, Abbas. Even the most basic manual type will give you real-time control over your heating, which would be a major improvement on what you currently have.

I definitely agree that a programmable thermostat is worthwhile - and may well save you money if you are ever a bit lax about turning the heating off once it is warm enough.  However, if you only have the one, I would make a case for a moveable thermostat, not one fixed permanently to a particular wall.  The flexibility of being able to occasionally pick the thermostat up and have it in a different place temporarily is great (eg to control a sick room temperature, or turn the living room radiators down and control the home office, or...)

Bendy_House

Good point, Theo. Many can be, including the Hive Mini.

It really is nifty, BUT needs the App - and therefore a Hub - for ease of use. 

Bendy_House

knightstyle said:

Just thinking about all the great advice on here and I wonder how old the installation is?  Have you ever had it flushed through?  Worth doing occasionally, every 10 years IMO, 
Plus if the room is so cold where is it loosing heat?  Have you thought about extra/improving insulation?

I'd assumed it was just a case of the heating not coming on in the morning.

Hopefully they'll come back with more info