How do you manage your central heating?

[Captain Jack]

Ouch - it's 43ppl around here... Though my tank is only 1300L, so we fill it up about twice a year.

[grasmere59]

The first thing I'd do is get the room thermostat from the landing to downstairs somewhere as being as heat rises it'll be turning off way too soon and not giving any true reflection of the living temp downstairs,change it for a programmable roomstat as they are far more accurate and have a smaller dead band as opposed to the old bi mattalic type ones.

[steve_earwig]

it's 43ppl around here

That's not so bad, the last time I checked the difference was something like 25ppl, so someone in the government here must have realised that heating is an essential, not a luxury... It's nearly as cheap as blue (red) diesel now too.

I'll need something like 1,200 litres for the season, even though it's only heating enough to stop stuff freezing the house is still a 4-bed detached, 200 sq. m.

Yeah, I know I could drain everything down and not bother, but it can get severe here and unheated houses tend to deteriorate rapidly.

[GingerMagic]

My house is an old 3 bed Victorian semi, with me and the Mrs and 2 kids.

We have the heating on as and when in November, but put it on constant at the start of December. Its kept at 18c during the day and maybe up to 20c in the evenings. I'm forever turning the bastard down but t' wife keeps turning it up again..

Since we had our heating problems we used the log-burner quite a bit, and now I am trying to keep on using it to keep the heating coming on less No point working for a Builders merchant and putting old wood in the bin now is there.?

Our combined Gas and Electric bill ( Scottish Power ) is currently £89 per month. Obviously more is used in the winter, less in the summer but this is the pro-rata cost.

[trufflehunt]

Never considered myself as a particularly hardy soul..., but 21, 22 23, 24 degrees C ?

Do you sit around at home in the middle of winter with just shorts and t-shirts.

16 degrees is about it for me.

[steve_earwig]

I know, I know, my dad has it at 15 but if anyone complains he turns it up... to 16. My first winter here I was going around in shorts complaining about it but in the end I figured when the summer can push 40 maybe it was too big a difference and accepting it might be a way to acclimatise myself. That and if I try to set it that low the heating screws up.

[Welly]

Never considered myself as a particularly hardy soul..., but 21, 22 23, 24 degrees C ?

Do you sit around at home in the middle of winter with just shorts and t-shirts.

16 degrees is about it for me.

I work too hard to sit in a cold (cool?) house at night time, I like to be warm. I tend to wear a T-shirt and I have a selection of 'Lounge Wear' for the bottom half, effectively Pajamas I'd typically sit there sipping a glass of Red wine and acting like the Sultan of Brunei....only with less wives, less moneh and far more reasons to be up early the next morning

[Bailes1992]

So I showed the missus this thread.
Explained to her it takes little power to 'top up' the heating in the house.
She finally agreed before complaining 5minutes that the central heating is giving her a headache and must be switched off immediately.

[steve_earwig]

You probably shouldn't show her this thread any more...

I suppose the implication there is she's inventing the headache in order to get her way. I have some experience here, although I won't scare you with details. Thing is, you don't know if it's real and brought on by the heat, brought on by the stress of conflict, or entirely fictitious. You can't see inside her head. If she gets a lot of them you should keep tabs, maybe she has a problem. Headaches can be a sign of all sorts of things, some obviously quite nasty.

Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced by this "run the heating all the time" idea, I understand that the material of the house holds the heat in and the heating doesn't need to run so hard if it's just "topping it up". Ok, that's fair enough, but say if you only run the heating once a week, when the heating comes on it has to run full tilt for ages to get up to temperature again. Ok, that's maybe wasteful, but how much fuel did you save by not running it for 6 days?

[benczuk]

Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced by this "run the heating all the time" idea, I understand that the material of the house holds the heat in and the heating doesn't need to run so hard if it's just "topping it up". Ok, that's fair enough, but say if you only run the heating once a week, when the heating comes on it has to run full tilt for ages to get up to temperature again. Ok, that's maybe wasteful, but how much fuel did you save by not running it for 6 days?

The question becomes is the full tilt run time > than the sum of the 'top up' run times though the day. Plus someone (Welly?) said earlier that condensing boilers are most efficient with low return temps. Assuming i am not mis-understanding, and treating their word as gospel (very dangerous i know), that would imply that the initial warm up time for the rads when the system is cold is at least semi efficient? If the temperature is only being topped up, you run in this efficient zone more often.

Best thing I ever did to reduce my heating bills though is to buy a newer house, its about 3 times the size of my old one, but costs half as much to heat Second best was buying one of these: http://r.ebay.com/CSybOF I can move it about freely and it operates at the correct temp unlike the bimetallic piece of junk I used to have.

[Welly]

Bailes should start a Heating & Headache correlation report to help* his GF; you can show an interest in whether the two things are linked and the best way is a log of times and events.

Also keep a food diary (we're all supposed to do this) and again compare to the headaches.

This way you are showing an active and careful interest in her health and starting to get to the route cause of the HA's. You could at least suggest this and see how it goes down.

Back to heating and steve, my opinion of 6 days off / 1 day on would be that in those 6 'off' days are the risks of condensation and frozen pipes worth the risk compared to heating-on-low strategy? I believe the benefits of having a fairly constant condition far outway any perceived savings.

Here's a real example; remember when my CH boiler crapped out last year? we had no heating for 4 days and despite running FOUR electric heaters the house was down to a steady 14 deg C. When the heating returned it took a good 2 days for the atmosphere to feel normal again, the structure of the building was acting like a sponge and sapping every bit of heat we could throw at it. The boiler was working its nuts off.

[DaiRees]

I have mine on timer, at the moment it's on from about 3pm until 7am, and I give it a few hours off when we're all out at work / school. We have thermostat valves on each radiator so don't have a room stats at all. I find the thermostat valves useless so control the temperature using the controls on the combi boiler. The house is a '60s semi dorma bungalow, which was built with no insulation whatsoever, so I've slowly worked my way through insulating everywhere, there are still a few small bits that I haven't yet (or can't) get to but it's so much better than it used to be! I used to keep the combi on about 3 (max is 9) to keep the house just warm enough, but these days it's on the lowest it'll go and I often find it uncomfortably warm (Mrs Dai loves it though ).

We do have proper problems with mould in some rooms though, I assume this is caused by condensation, but can't bring myself to open the windows when it's cold outside, it brings back memories of my Father shouting "I'm paying to heat the bloody garden!!!", apple never falls far eh?

[Welly]

You run heating from 3pm to 7am? on all through the night?

You really should run the boiler much hotter on the heating side and have a room stat to take overall charge. When you run the boiler down to approx 50 deg C with no control it tends to cycle on/off a lot; this sees un-burnt gas going up the flue during the ignition cycles and far too often.

The heat-emission from the rads will have been sized for a mean temp of 75 deg C, lower temps give this constant demand for heat kinda thing. I've seen rads over-sized for 50 deg C systems and they're f*cking huge.

I run the rads at full temp (80 deg C) they give up their heat, the room warms up, rad valve closes down and the volume of system water to be heated reduces quickly, soon either the boiler will be 'satisfied' and cut the burner or the room stat will kill the lot.

I've got two 'open' rads with no thermostats in two of the bathrooms so if all the others are closed there's still a flow circuit available, this rarely happens but helps dry towels etc

[Bailes1992]

The heating wasn't on when she moans of a headache. The house was as a steady 20 degrees and the thermostat had clicked out.

Today I opened all the windows ajar and pulled the fuse out of the spur for the central heating.

[DaiRees]

You run heating from 3pm to 7am? on all through the night?

You really should run the boiler much hotter on the heating side and have a room stat to take overall charge. When you run the boiler down to approx 50 deg C with no control it tends to cycle on/off a lot; this sees un-burnt gas going up the flue during the ignition cycles and far too often.

The heat-emission from the rads will have been sized for a mean temp of 75 deg C, lower temps give this constant demand for heat kinda thing. I've seen rads over-sized for 50 deg C systems and they're f*cking huge.

I run the rads at full temp (80 deg C) they give up their heat, the room warms up, rad valve closes down and the volume of system water to be heated reduces quickly, soon either the boiler will be 'satisfied' and cut the burner or the room stat will kill the lot.

I've got two 'open' rads with no thermostats in two of the bathrooms so if all the others are closed there's still a flow circuit available, this rarely happens but helps dry towels etc

Yeah, run it low and constant was the advice of the guy that fitted it back in 1997, I'm always open to advice though. As I said earlier though I find the thermostat valves very poor for keeping the room comfortable. So could I get one of those remote stats above that would work with my 17 year old Vaillant combi? Might have to experiment here....