Turning down TRV's

[Dark Angel]

Is there any merit in having your thermostatic radiator valves all turned down to minimum on a gas fired central heating system?

Reason I ask is that for some reason my father is obsessed with going round his house and turning down all the radiator TRV's in rooms no-one is presently using.

He seems to think its saving energy, but I can't see the sense in this, as being on the minimum setting, the radiators never warm the rooms properly and my mother and sister end up using electric heaters to warm the room when they come to use them.

I've tried pointing this out to him, but the only answer I get is that he can't see the point in wasting energy heating rooms no-one is using.

Is this logic or madness?

[Peter Andrews]

He is right if the rooms are not being used and the doors are shut - but not if you need to use electricity to make them usable. The best scenario IMO is to turn them down so that the room is about 15degs when not being used, but will quickly come up to 21deg if you turn the valve up a bit.

Peter

[Mindwipe]

best thing he could do then is go round with a thermometer and set them all till they are balanced with the doors ajar at about 16 deg upstairs

[Set Square]

Both! It makes some sense to save energy when rooms are not being used - but it's total madness then to use electric heaters. What's wrong with turning the TRVs up again?

[SimonJ]

Turning the TRV's down is perfectly logical, and yes it will save energy.

The madness is that your mother and sister are using electric heaters, why not turn the TRV's up when they are using a room, then turn them back down when they have finished?

[manatbandq]

Probably because the system thinks the rest of the house is up to temperature and so there's no flow through the rads.

Heat loss from the heated rooms will be slightly greater depending on the temp of the unheated ones and the U value of the walls.

MBQ

[Brian Sharrock]

This reminds me of when -decades ago- I installed central heating into my house during a week off work. Having satisfied myself that everything was fully functional - I returned to work on a very cold day. Returning home, I found my wife and children sitting in front of the gas fire on full belt! 'The radiators are cold" my wife complained "The central heating isn't working' ! ... Yep, she'd 'automatically' turned on the gas-fire and the thermostat told the boiler not to bother firing up!

[Dave Plowman (News)]

No - it ceases being a heating system then.

Ah - only in unused rooms?

Why don't they simply turn up the TRVs sometime before they occupy the rooms?

Seems fair enough to me - provided they're left on the frost setting.

[fred]

In article , Brian Sharrock writes

Sorry mate, that is your fault* for having the thermostat in a room with a supplementary heat source.

• Both your fault and "your fault" {TM} - as spoken by t'missus.

[Dark Angel]

As a side issue, that was a problem with the heating installed in my grandmothers house.

[Dark Angel]

There are a number of problems, firstly that the radiators in a couple of the rooms don't appear to be quite up to the job so it takes a long while for the rooms to heat up. Secondly, if the room with the room stat is up to temperature the heating won't be on and the radiators won't warm up when turned on.

[dennis]

That is caused by fitting the room stat in the wrong place and/or not having the correct controls. A very common fault.

[Dark Angel]

Well rooms that no-one is in at the time, obviously when you go upto bed and the heating has been on you expect it to be warm. Not freezing cold.

They could, but there are also the problems mentioned elsewhere with rooms taking a long time to heat up and the heating being off because the timer isn't on when they come to use the room, or the heatings off because the room with the room stat is upto temperature.

It would make sense to me if the rooms weren't being used at all, the fact of the matter is there are more rooms than people and whichever room they're occupying at the time my father turns down/off the heating in the other and because of the aformentioned other problems most of the rooms are never warm, so they're having to resort to using the electric fires to get them up to temperature.

[Rob Morley]

Can't you get TRVs that can be locked so you can only turn them up or down a certain amount?

[Brian Sharrock]

But was actually caused by somebody turning on the gas fire which heated the room before the central-heating system was enabled by its time switch/controller... the whereabouts of the sensor was irrelevant to the scenario. Some folks can't comprehend what is written. They were taught in the wrong place. A very common fault.

[dennis]

If you fit the room stat in a room with another heat source then it is *not* going to work properly and as such it is a error on the part of the installer. Anyone with any common sense would know this. Have a look at single stat+compressor fridge freezers which suffer from the same problem in reverse. Its all down to bodging CH systems using TRVs which isn't the correct way to do the job.