Help With Balancing Radiators Please

AfxTwn

Hi, I am trying to balance my radiators but need a little help in doing this please. I understand the basic principle of turning all the lock shield valves on full (as well as TRV's), turning the heating on and then running round the house seeing which one warms up first and in which order but this is easier said than done.

I live in a small, mid-terraced, early-to-mid-nineties, two-bedroom house which has the stairs in the living room in an open-plan style (so no hallway and the stairs aren't boxed in) which causes a lot of the heat to escape upstairs. My Glow Worm Compact 24c combi boiler is located in the kitchen next to the living room downstairs and each of the rooms in the house have radiators in (the radiators downstairs are all single panel, single convector type and the two upstairs bedrooms are single panel, no convector with a small single panel, single convector in the bathroom).

Anyway, here are some crude pictures I made in MS Paint to show the basic layout.



When I have gone round checking the radiators to see the order in which they heat up, I found this very hard to do. Common sense would suggest that the kitchen radiator would heat up first as that is nearest to the boiler but it felt like it was the small living room radiator (just before the stairs in the bottom left of the top picture) and then possibly the kitchen. I ran upstairs to check those radiators and it seemed like something of a three-way race between all the rooms there, possibly the front bedroom first and then the bathroom or living room and finally the back bedroom? I was so confused by the whole thing and couldn't really identify the correct order.

I know that generally upstairs is always quite a bit colder than downstairs and the back bedroom is the coldest of them all. All radiators have TRV valves on them except the large radiator in the living. I generally set my portable thermostat to 18 degrees and leave it on the coffee table in the middle of the living room. The main issue is that as downstairs heats up much quicker than upstairs then the thermostat knocks off but upstairs can still only be 16 degrees or so (I have thermometers in each room). I have set the TRV's in all rooms to number 3 out of 5 as generally I am comfortable at 18-19 degrees.

I do have a laser thermometer gun that I have tried pointing at the flow and return pipes of the radiators (I think flow is the TRV end and return the lock shield) but it's always hard to get a steady temperature to display, it seems to just jump around a lot. I can't find any clip-on pipe digital thermometers that aren't professional grade and cost a lot.

I have the combi boilers heating set to 65 degrees C and the water to 55 per the manual but I don't know about lowering that to get it into condensing mode after reading people suggesting 50-55 for the heating?

Do I need to worry about the order the radiators warm up in or should I just use logic and assume it goes: kitchen, living room large, living room small, front bedroom, bathroom and finally back bedroom? Any help making this simpler would be great thank you.

Albermarle

I do not know about the order, but having the heating temperature at 65 degrees, should still mean the boiler will be in condensing mode. However it will probably run a bit more efficiently still if you drop down a few degrees.
In a small house like this the upstairs should not be colder than downstairs ( unless that is what you want) . It is maybe down to the fact the radiators are smaller. 
You might also experiment with moving the portable thermostat around.

AfxTwn

Albermarle said:

I do not know about the order, but having the heating temperature at 65 degrees, should still mean the boiler will be in condensing mode. However it will probably run a bit more efficiently still if you drop down a few degrees.
In a small house like this the upstairs should not be colder than downstairs ( unless that is what you want) . It is maybe down to the fact the radiators are smaller. 
You might also experiment with moving the portable thermostat around.

I think possibly that the loft insulation isn't the best and/or past it's best anyway (that old yellow type that makes you cough your lungs up and it's full of rat or mice droppings towards the back of the house - no sign of any rodents though fortunately). I am thinking this year I will see if I can get it replaced with something better if funds allow. Replacing the radiators is another thing I'd like to do but again, this is going to be quite expensive.

It also doesn't help that the living room door opens to a small vestibule entrance by the front door and the living room door has massive gap underneath (currently covered over with a thick draught excluder), so I think that door lets a lot of the cold in and heat out, it's another thing I want to replace at some point. I did try putting some spongey draught excluder strips round the frame where the gaps are but as the door is kind of wonky and has uneven gaps, it proved difficult to get them to line up and the door close properly.

In the summer I have the opposite problem where the upstairs is much hotter than downstairs.