Advice needed with Stanley Super Star Range

[steve573]

Hi All,

We've just bought an old (1870) place in Snowdonia and it came with an oil fired Stanley Super Star range in the kitchen that does the cooking, hot water and central heating and seems to work fine. Just want to know if its better to leave these on all the time (with regard to the central heating) or on and off with the clock timer connected to it. Only ask as the house has massively thick stone walls and we've been told to leave it on constantly even when we are at work to heat the stone up which is more efficient although we were then told to turn it on and off when we need it by somebody else. Obviously this makes for a colder place initially but as money (i.e oil costs) is a concern we just want to know what the best way of using these things is. Is there a great difference in costs in keeping it on all the time when it only kicks in now and again to keep the CH water hot or leave it off overnight and when we are at work even though it then uses lots more oil to heat the CH water up to temp and to get bthe house up there too. Thanks for any advice in advance,

Happy New Year, Steve.

[EricP]

The only person who can answer this is you, by simple experimentation, since it will all depend on the constructionof the walls and more important the roof insulation.

A friend found the perfect situation was to keep their oil heating on low background at 60F and use a nice open hearth for a real fire when they came home, to give a heavy boost to the heating.

[Harry Bloomfield]

steve573 submitted this idea :

Obviously keeping it on will cost more, how much more will depend upon heat loss through the buildings fabric. The poorer the insulation, the more of the heat will be lost/wasted.

Rather than turning it off completely, could you perhaps use a set back temperature - which would reduce the cost dramatically?

[Owain]

Old stone houses can take *days* to warm up if you let them get cold, so I'd agree with the other suggestions of using a programmable thermostat to achieve a set-back temperature. Also, make sure you can control the heating and hot water separately.

If you want to be warm, you're going to have to pay the oil bill :-(

Hope you treated the Mrs at Xmas to a new floral polyester pinafore and wellies :-)

Owain

[Dave Baker]

The answer is a matter of simple physics unaffected by the type of boiler or type of house. The rate of heat loss rises with the temperature of the thing radiating heat. The hotter you keep the house the more heat will be lost to outside. How quickly this happens obviously depends on insulation but sure as eggs is eggs eventually all the heat you put in will find its way out. So the cheapest way is only heat the house when you need to. Whether its worth being cold for a while every day until the house warms back up is down to you and your pocket. Personally I can't be arsed about a few quid or even a few hundred quid spent or wasted on heating costs if it means the house is comfy all the time. It's still a pittance compared to the other costs in life.

As has been suggested a compromise would be to have a base temperature setting that's at least bearable until the house gets back up to normal temperature each evening rather than let the place cool right down every day. Of some minor interest is the fact that an overspecced boiler and radiator setup can be a better thing in situations like this than a smaller one. It gets the house up to temperature faster and means it's less of a burden leaving it off completely during the day. With a system that struggles to replace the lost heat it can take hours to get back up to full temp and then it's time to go to bed anyway.

As to thick stone walls I'm not sure they're much of a benefit. They soak up all the heat you can chuck at them until they reach equilibrium with the outside world and then dissipate all this again as soon as the heating is off. Ideal insulation is not lots of a poor insulator which just acts as a heatsink but as little as possible of a very good one. You might find that the best thing you can do for both comfort and heating bills is line the external walls with celotex or something similar.

-- Dave Baker Puma Race Engines

Camp USA engineer minces about for high performance specialist (4,4,7)

[Dave Liquorice]

Leave it on. Those thick stone walls act as heat (or cold) storage. We have a 17th C stone built place, we made the mistake of switching the heating off once when we went away for a few days. It took a few more days upon our return for the place to become comfortable again, the air temp was OK but the cold stone was sucking the heat out something rotten.

By all means have a room stat to control the temp and have a set back for when you aren't actually there but letting the place cool down is a mistake from the comfort point of view. A highly insulated modern box with low thermal mass is the opposite, only heat on demand.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Dave Baker" saying something like:

The typical 2ft thick old farmhouse wall is as good an insulator as a single brick skin. Iow, shit. It surprised me when I discovered that.

Similar situations I've seen include that (external) which works well if rooms inside are small already, but if the internal rooms can take the space loss, conventional dry lining with Kingspan incorporated works wonders.