Our church is doing up a large 3-storey victorian terrace house to use as meeting rooms. There will be 5 meeting rooms on the 3 floors. We want to zone the heating, probably by floor, so that we don't need to heat up the whole place if someone wants to use one room. But we would like to have the heating controlled from one unit, and be able to program the requirements in advance, e.g. heat the 1st floor from 6pm-10pm every wednesday evening; heat the whole place on Sundays from 9am - 1pm. I reckon we'd need 15-20 heating periods across all the zones.
The zoning is easy enough, but this type of programming requirement completely bamboozles all the heating contractors who seem to have barely got to grips with electronic programmers at all. Does anyone know of an existing control system which would allow this sort of thing?
On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 10:59:36 +0000, in uk.d-i-y Tim Mitchell strung together this:
A programmable room stat in each room, controlling that rooms valve\zone. I can't see any difficulty whatsoever. I have fitted more complex controls in schools\offices etc.. that would do exactly what you wanted from a central controller with various sensors\optimizers etc.. but for your application it would run into thousands. ..
That is definitely the simplest option but it would make overriding or programming the heating a bit of a safari trek round all the rooms. That was why we were thinking of a central control unit.
I'm really just investigating possibilities, if it works out too expensive then so be it, we'll go with programmable room stats. We only really need on-off control, not remote temp sensing, we could have a stat in the rooms to control the temperature.
Buy enough cheap 7 day twin channel programmers so that there are enough channels to cover all the zones and install them in the central location. Wire the outputs in series with a conventional room stat in the rooms to the
2 port zone valves. Boiler interlock from zone valve microswitches.
Obviously, the programmers would be labelled CH + HW, but this could be sorted with a bit of Tippex. Also, programmers aren't the easiest things to program, particularly if you have loads of schedule changes every week.
A PC based solution connected to the web would be better, so you could set it to heat a meeting when you aren't even in the building and would be much easier to program. It wouldn't be cheap, though.
The CM67 will provide 6 temperature changes per day - and different programmes for each day of the week - BUT it will only control one zone. To meet the OPs requirements, THREE CM67s would be required - one for each zone. If remote temperature sensors were used, all 3 CM67s could be in the same location if required. This *isn't* controlling the whole thing from one unit - but is getting fairly close.
The plumbing would need to be configured as an S-Plan-plus arrangement (See
In a church/community building the CM67 flexibility has a lot going for it as you can set a higher or lower temperature depending on the activity. In our church we have 8C as the minimum across the week to stop the building (and organ especially) getting too cold, 15C to take the chill off for cleaning and flower arranging and 19C on Sundays.
Yes, which is why I pointed the OP to a building that had 11 controlling 11 zones. Three CM67's and remote sensors will only be about £250 which would be a lot cheaper than the single multizone control panel he was thinking of
Yes, but it won't be straightforward to program and operate, which is what I was hoping for. If this means it's too expensive then we can do it the cheap way, but I was wanting to know if anything existed to do it as one unit, and if so how much it costs, so we can make an informed decision.
The sight of 11 CM67's in a row, as on the website Tony gave, strikes fear into the heart. I don't want to be the only person who knows how to operate the heating!!
Cheap is not really the requirement. Something which does the job well is more important. Our current main church building heating has such an obscure control system that only one person knows how to program it. This means that it is never on when it needs to be. I want something which is a bit more user friendly.
OK, I agree that the link makes this clear - but the *text* of your previous response implied that it could all be done with *one* CM67 (thus meeting the OP's requirement of doing it from a single unit) - which it patently can't.
On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 11:22:38 +0000, in uk.d-i-y Tim Mitchell strung together this:
The units I've used are along the lines of the Drayton DC 1100. Maybe a smaller solution could be used for your application if you don't want to go commercial. The advantage of a unit like the DC1100 is that the sensors are monitoring the room temp while the actual setting is done from the controller. As a guide the DC 1100 is about £6-700 and room sensors are around £40-50 each. Then there's all the other sensors, then the cabling, commisioning. I don't think you'd get what you want for any less than about £3-4000. How many zones have you got? If you're only zoning per floor then I assume you're having TRV's in all the rooms. If you do go for standard stats in the rooms with a central controller then this will still involve a wander round to check what they're set to whilst checking times etc.. would have to be done centrally. To do exactly what you want you would be wanting the commercial solution, depends on how much the functionality is required over budget stretching. ..
I guess you're after something that is intuitive rather than requiring a look at the manual before use. An in-between solution would be to produce a very simple basic HOWTO that gets stuck on the wall next to the programmer. Enough information to help someone do it, but not too much as to confuse them.
What might also be useful is a wipe-clean laminated sheet next to each programmer (assuming multiple ones) for each room/zone. The times that the room will be heated and the temperatures etc can be put into that. When someone makes a change to it they can then write the change onto the sheet. This way its easy to tell at a glance what the settings are. Plus, having something like that can help people program the programmer because they can see what is already there and recognise it when they get to the correct point - if you see what I mean.
My only concern with allowing anyone/multiple people to make changes to the programmer is that you can easily make mistakes. For example, someone might need to change it for a once off meeting during the winter and then forget to remove it later (causing the place to be heated to a higher temp than needed at a time when its actually empty) or even to accidentally change the time/temp of a subsequent meeting which then means its cold when it should be hot.
It might be better to have an easy override system and ensure that the system can heat up a room quickly. This way someone can come in slightly early for the meeting etc (which in my experience is normal anyway to set up etc) and if its cold then they can override it for an hour or until the next programmed change and it will warm up by the time the meeting starts etc.
That is a very fair comment, and was raised in our church so I put together a short guide which explains what we have and what it does: if you want a copy please email me (we only have one main CM67 but have two boilers and additional control stats for these).
It probably does come down to a tradeoff between simplicity, efficiency and versatility and what is right for you will partly depend on whether you have relatively constant usage patterns so once you've put the required heating program in it won't need much changing or whether it changes every week. IMO the CM67 needs a reasonably intelligent person to gain from what it offers (which is a lot more than a basic timeswitch/stat setup), but not someone with a PhD.
On a tangent, had you considered using fan assisted convector radiators to get rapid warm up to the rooms? It's still hot water central heating, but more suited to an on-demand system. You could match them with countdown/boost timeswitches in the rooms.
I guess it depends on how silent you want your silence to be . In our church we've got 9 fan convectors and though you would notice the (lack of) sound if you turned them all off at once, with them running (at low speed) it's nothing more than an unobtrusive background sound.
What would really annoy would be heaters cutting on and off: we have effectively bypassed the stats in each heater and also keep the pump running while the water in the system is 40C or more, whether or not the boiler is running. The heaters thus come on (one at a time) when the low level stat cuts in and for most of the heating season run continually during a Sunday service even though the boiler may cut in and out several times during this period. This high level of sophistication is achieved by wiring the pump through a £10 pipe stat!
I think your problem may then be that everyone and his brother re-programs it - wrong (at least for other users). It's the eternal problem of any communal heating/ventilating system.
Yes, this is true. The best solution seems to be to have a small highly-trained team of heating programmers, keep the equipment in a locked cupboard to which only the select few have access, and program in everything you know about. But then have a big red button on the outside saying "turn the heating on for 1 hour" for the things you didn't know about.
Maybe we should just stick a fan heater in each room and forget it!
On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 15:27:20 +0000, in uk.d-i-y Tim Mitchell strung together this:
I've done similar to this before, although it was with electric heating the same control system can be used for your application. What you can do to stop 'tampering' is use room stats with hidden controls, i.e. you have to take off the cover to adjust the temperature. For override a timelag switch in each room fitted to the relevant zone would bring the heating on for whatever time the switch is set to.
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