I know it’s been asked before but heating/boiler question

Lt8878 · 16 December 2018 at 10:49AM

Hi

We had a new Worcester Bosch greenstar heatslave II boiler installed in March and it has made a massive difference to the warmth of house and the oil use.

We live in an old sandstone farm cottage which is double glazed and has recent insulation in the loft but as you can imagine it doesn’t hold heat for long.

I have a portable thermostat which is in the living room most of the time but when he put the fire on I move it to th hall otherwise the heating won’t come on. I keep he thermostat set for an hour in the morning at 17 degrees which switches off when we leave and it set to 14 degrees until it comes on again at 6pm set at 18 degrees and then off again at 8.30, I then keep it set at 14 overnight as well. I know a lot of stuff says switch off overnight or low but my thinking is that the boiler will work less hard heating the house from 14 to 17 in the morning than if it dropped to 10 or 11 or even colder at the minute over night? I know the boiler does come on for short bursts over night to maintain the 14

Next question and I have looked and can’t find a definitive answer about condensing mode, I have the temp on eh boiler itself set at 64 degrees and am unsure if this is too hot for condensing? I think of any lower that house won’t get warm though?

Anyway thanks for any insight and answers you can give!

neilmcl · 16 December 2018 at 11:00AM

There's no hard and fast rules regarding your thermostat, just set it to the temperature you're comfortable with. I'm surprise your house temp drops below 14C overnight, it must really lose heat then as I have mine set to 14 and has never come on during the night. Having said that your max evening temp would be too low for me, I prefer 19-20 depending on how cold it gets. What thermostat are you running? Some have an optimiser mode that may cause your boiler to come on at unexpected times.

I also would advise about keep moving the thermostat, try and stick to one place.

As far as condensing is concerned I was told to keep the boiler temp at 65-70 degrees, it's the return flow temp that's important for condensing and this needs to be hitting around 55 degrees or lower.

SandraX · 16 December 2018 at 11:07AM

Personally, I find these central thermoses useless. We have our central thermo on full wack and control the temp via individual temp valves on radiators. We flick the on-off switch as required and leave the heating on if our for several hours. When we worked, we'd sett up the timer for 4-30 in the morning to come on so warm when we got up and turned off at 7 by the time we left and came back on at 3-30 as we returned home for 4.

Lt8878 · 16 December 2018 at 11:49AM

Thanks for replying

A few people have said my evening temp is quite low but we all find this comfortable enough at the moment especially when we have the open fire on as it’s gets very warm then

Yeah before I started leaving the thermostat set at 14 overnight it was dropping to around 12

We have a Honeywell portable programmable thermostat

MR_M_P · 16 December 2018 at 11:57AM

How much less oil is the new boiler using?

Lt8878 · 16 December 2018 at 12:03PM

I haven’t got a lot to go on but when we first moved in there was a very old boiler in 10+ years old and we put 500 litres in the tank which blew through in 3 weeks! Which I think was due to having it in for really long periods to try and get some heat in the house but it wasn’t really heating the rooms well either. There was also no timer only the thermostat in the hall which you had to manually switch on and off so no controlling the temp for getting up or being able to keep it ambient so the house was heating up from cold all the time

Anyway after that I topped up 700 litres and started to just switch on in the morning and at night which did use less but even then by the time the new boiler was installed it had used around another 500 litres in about 6 weeks.

I didn’t bother topping up again as this was April and the weather was getting warmer so the heating was hardly on and never when we had the heatwaves only for hot water. I topped up again in September so around 700 litres in the tank again and by the end of September the heating was coming on again and I’ve had it set like that to come on regularly since and it’s only used around 300 litres in 12 weeks

Sorry it doesn’t make much sense

Lt8878 · 16 December 2018 at 12:18PM

Another thing I’ve been thinking about it’s a weather compensator? Would this work? Are they worth it?

I know it’s been asked before but heating/boiler question

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