Central heating - that time again

[Graham.]

Jumper in the day and electric blanket in bed the last couple of nights, I haven't had the urge to turn the CH on yet.

[David]

We are heading for a cool week with maximum outside temperatures forecast to be around 14C to 16C.

In spring this would, to me, be a sign that it was still too early to turn off the CH.

In autumn it feels as though the extra jumper route is appropriate for the moment.

I know that some people leave the CH on year round on the sensible argument that they maintain a constant indoor temperature so why ever turn it off?

I seem to have a few mental hang ups about temperature; for example if we have hot days and cold nights it doesn't feel right to heat the house overnight then throw the doors wide open during the day to allow that expensive heated air to flow out.

I think if I know that it is going to be eventually warm without the CH I am reluctant to turn it on. If it is cold and miserable outside I seem to want a higher average temperature inside. Not logical (as in wear a jumper) but then I can probably afford the extra gas to raise the inside temperature to 20C (or a bit more) so the house is toasty when I come in from the cold.

We also have significant solar gain at the back of the house so at the moment 50% of the house is around 22-24C and the other half at around

18-19C. Noting that I did try the experiment to move the hot air to the cold rooms but couldn't achieve a high enough flow rate with extractor fan technology. I think you would need industrial size air ducts (the kind people crawl along inside in films) to achieve an adequate rate of air exchange.

No doubt things will get slowly colder during the week as heat outflow is greater than heat inflow over a number of days.

For those who turn the CH off in the summer, is it CH on time again? I assume some of those in the NW have already passed that point.

Cheers

Dave R

[The Natural Philosopher]

I lit the Aga a few weeks ago and ran the UFH for te first time yesrday

- today it is sunny enough to not need it.

Also seem to have first cold of the autumn.

Glad I got the woodshed (almost) finished..

[Graeme]

In message [e-mail]>, David [e-mail] writes

NE here, rather than NW. First (light) frost this morning, so downstairs heating on for an hour to take the chill off. Front of the house faces SW, with large bay windows which capture the sun (and heat) from late morning to sunset, but temp will drop after sunset, so downstairs heating will be on for an hour early/mid evening. Upstairs heating for half an hour before bedtime.

[charles]

we turned ours on the day before yesterday.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Perhaps you need to investigate proper temperature control if your house can get too hot due to the CH being on.

[Steve Walker]

I think that he was saying that is seems wasteful to heat the house at night and then when it is warmed further by the sun in the morning, be opening doors and windows to let the hot air out, when he could stay warmer in the evening by wearing more and let the house warm up naturally the next day.

SteveW

[Chris Hogg]

And a CH timer. I have a house thermostat, the CH is on all year but time-clocked to only come on for limited periods during the day if the thermostat calls for it, and with individual thermostats on the radiators. Nothing fancy, no wireless thermostats or anything like that, just basic stuff. Works OK.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'd say it's always wasteful to heat the house at night. And a decent system will compensate if it suddenly gets warm outside during the morning.

[Brian Gaff]

I have gone half way. This morning a few mins with a fan heater and a oil filled heater upstairs. When it gets a lot colder I guess it will be storage heater time again. Looking at the bills though, it might actually be better to go nocturnal, and just live awake overnight as whether its dark or light makes little difference to me except for phone calls and shopping most of the time! Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

again?

Never turn it off, thermal mass of the place means you really don't want it to cool down or it'll take days to warm back up to comfortable again.

Not surprised, the "snowflake" was lit up on the cars dashboard almost all the way to Newcastle this morning. Beautifully clear sky, Milky Way cleary visible, without properly dark adpated eyes, as I got into the car at 0430. Bit of an inversion around Whitfield in the Allen valley where the air temp got down to 1C, higher up it was 3 or

4 C.

It's certainly getting cooler, days with no demand for heat:

Sep 18: 1 Oct 18: 0 Jan 19: 0 Feb 19: 0 Mar 19: 0 Apr 19: 6 May 19: 3 Jun 19: 4 Jul 19: 16 Aug 19: 8 Sep 19: 0 (so far...)

[John Rumm]

Indeed, I leave mine running (with weather compensation and a programmable stat) all the time.

Here is where a programmable stat helps, such that it can select different temperatures for different times of day. I have my overnight setback temp set at 15 degrees, and that generally means that the CH won't fire (for heating) at all in the night anyway.

I also find that weather compensation works very well at this time of year, since you are hardly even aware of the CH starting to kick in. It will run very gently in the morning with a flow temp that might only be

40 degrees or so, and then remain off for the rest of the day.

I noticed that mine was starting to heat the upstairs rads a bit in the morning about a week ago or so.

I guess if I had to do it manually, I might of waited a week, although that is a difficult call since I don't know how cold it would have felt without that little bit of heating in the morning.

[Steve Walker]

Not when you stay up late and someone else gets up early.

The point is that keeping the house warm overnight or heating it up in the morning seems wasteful if the sun does the job by itself later in the morning.

SteveW

[polygonum_on_google]

Haven't even seriously thought about it yet. Bedrooms are cooler but beds are perfectly warm enough after a few minutes.

Main reason we do tend to get round to turning it on is when it is damp out there.

Biggest reason to be thoughtful is that we so often open the garden room doors to outside and that then triggers the heating to come on - usually unnecessarily until it is much cooler.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In this case night generally means a time when people are in bed.

OK. So you prefer to freeze when getting up early?

[Steve Walker]

No, I prefer to heat it, but the David was saying that he felt it wasteful and you replied "Perhaps you need to investigate proper temperature control if your house can get too hot due to the CH being on" which was not what I read the post as being about and I was simply stating why he might have felt it wasteful.

SteveW

[charles]

Knowingb it's going to be warm at 10am, doesn't make you warm at 6.30am.

[tabbypurr]

I used to hate waking up with ice on the inside of the windows, but as a kid you don't get to choose.

NT

[Dave Plowman (News)]

When you woke up with the hot water bottle frozen you had something to moan about. ;-)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Quite - if the sun starts to warm up the house later in the morning, even a simple system should accommodate for this. A weather compensated one rather more efficiently.