Leaving Heating on Whilst on Holiday

Have a boiler with built in frost protection.

You can get external frost thermostats which will run the heating if the temperature drops below a certain point, even if the other controls are off.

Alternatively, you can just turn the main room thermostat to a low setting.

You have a choice for the heating. Either leave the system on set to 8C or thereabouts, or turn the system off and drain it down. What you don't want is the system off, but full of water. Personally, for 2 weeks, I'd leave the system on, provided it was a sealed system.

As for the water side, rather than heating side, my system is entirely mains pressure, so I would turn off the stopcock and open all the taps to drain it down.

Christian.

Maybe this is the time to fit a programmable thermostat (such as the Honeywell CM67) in place of your existing room stat, if you haven't already got one?

This would enable you to:

• use the 'holiday' setting so that the heating is off* while you are away, but comes back on -to normal temperature settings - (say) the day before your scheduled return, so that you come back to a nice warm house
• use the stat as a frost stat while you are away. * 'Off' isn't actually off - but simply controls to a much lower specifiable temperature (typically

This is what I do when I go away in the winter.

Going away in the winter I turn the room stat down to minimum (8-10) and the HW down to 40 (or off it's for more than a week and not predicted to be sub zero for much of that). The system's quite spread out, so the reserve of heat in the HW tank will protect much of the pipework. We have to be careful to leave a door open into the kitchen though - it's unheated with 2 outide walls and only 100mm insulation in the flat roof.

Chris