I've just had a room thermostat controller fitted to my CH system.
When I moved into the house, it had only the controls on the boiler itself and thermostatic valve controls on each radiator. I found this inflexible because of the lack of timed control.
How do I set the radiator thermostats in the room with the room thermo (they go 1-5) so that they don't override or interfere with the room thermo operation?
I'm guessing set them on full in the room where the room thermo is...but I am only guessing.
Yes, set the TRV at max in the room with the room stat. Better still, remove the capsule assembly from the valve. If the rad then produces too much heat on a permanent basis, turn its lockshield valve down a bit. [This is only a stop-gap solution, because . . .]
Ideally, you should balance the system by adjusting the lockshields - with the TRVs fully open - to get a uniform temperature drop across all radiators. Finally, adjust the TRVs in all rooms except the one with the room stat to give the required comfort level, and set the room stat so that it switches everything off when the whole house is at the required temperature.
That's not as easy as it sounds. I've just updated my CH and have put the thermostat in the lounge on the basis that's where I want the temperature to be most accurate. Trouble is that the background heat in that room varies. Each person = 100W, Candles = 40W-110W (40W is night light, TV watts all end up as heat as do lights etc. So you can see that you can quickly unbalance the system.
Also, if the radiator surface in the sense room is on the large side that too can make it difficult to sense the average house temperature (or perhaps rather the coldest room temperature).
What I find happens is everyone ends up in the lounge at night and the heating stops running at all. Come bedtime and the bedrooms are freezing :-(.
I'm going to try the hall next to see if that is any better, but that has problem of heat leakage from the kitchen or loss when the front door is opened. Top landing is another area that I might try. Radio thermostats are ideal for sort of messing around but I don't have one :-( so it will be temporary cables until I find the best place.
A single thermostat is necessarily a compromise - regardless of whether or not you have TRVs in other rooms. The 'ideal' is an S++ system, with a separate zone (and room stat) in every room - but that gets a bit expensive to implement.
If your system could be split into two zones - maybe upstairs and downstairs - this would help, and would keep the bedrooms warm even if the lounge stat had turned off the downstairs zone.
I have a similar problem, with a single stat in the hall - but the hall isn't particularly representative of temperatures throughout the house generally, so I'm wondering about relocating the stat into the dining room. Please post the results of your experiment. Others - myself included - will probably find them useful.
The message from "Set Square" contains these words:
I did that some years ago and it would certainly address the ops problem but I did in more because being home most days I needed at least some heat downstairs all day while the bedrooms didn't.
We had quite a lengthy discussion on this ng some years ago in a thread I think I started after the firm that serviced my brother-in-laws boiler quoted what I thought was an excessively high price for modifications and insisted the *only* correct place for a house thermostat was in the hall.
I have advocated the living room as the obvious site for years but that does have a significant problem if the house has a real fire or other subsidiary heat source in the living room or, as in the ops case, the living room has an excess of heating surface. However ISTM that there is an easy workround in that thermostats in parallel and TRVs all round would provide alternate systems with very little adjustment in shifting from living room centred to the other thermostat centred heating.
My present house has a central heating system which has thermostatic control valves on all radiators apart from one which is necessary to allow to be on all the time as a heat sink. I decided to have this one in the hall. Compared to my last house which had a central control thermostat controlling all radiators such as you are discussing, I have found this system far more satisfactory as I can set each room differently and if necessary can be locally adjusted Of course the main difficulty with any heating system is everyone feels cold or hot in a different way. depending on their medical condition at that time.. I have an oil condensing boiler which is very efficient and in a 3 bedroom bungalow my average heating bill is £250 Being retired the heating is on quite a lot in Winter (Perthshire, Scotland) Blair Malcolm
The only problem with this setup is that there's no boiler interlock. So the boiler wastes energy keeping itself - and your heat sink radiator - hot, even when the whole house is hot enough. I don't know about Scotland, but the Building Regs in England require all *new* heating installations to have a boiler interlock.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.