Our house has a concrete ground floor so all of the downstairs radiators are fed from various points upstairs. This means that it's impossible to set up separate upstairs and downstairs zones.
TRVs are already fitted but I would like the extra time control that zoning would offer.
The only solution I can think of is to install valves on each of the radiators and control them electronically and/or wirelessly.
Has anyone any ideas/experience?
I've got your exact setup - with a single heating circuit running between the floors, with feeds up to the first floor rads and down to the ground floor rads all interspersed. That's what I inherited when I bought the house 35 years ago. If I were starting from scratch, I'd probably install two manifolds - one feeding upstairs and the other downstairs - but it's too much of a faff trying to modify an existing system.
Are you thinking of trying to do the zoning on a per-floor basis - with a room stat on each floor, and some means of remotely controlling all the rads on that floor in unison, or are you looking for per-room zoning
- which would require a room stat in each room? There are various devices for doing either of these - but they tend to be quite expensive, and a bit fiddly. Although I've toyed with the idea of doing something, I don't realistically think that it will ever get high enough up on my list of priorities.
On Sunday 20 January 2013 23:10 F wrote in uk.d-i-y:
LightwaveRF have been mentioned as coming out with a product - though some on their forums seem to be not totally happy with their products.
From their forums, I found a link to some competitor products:
The only fly is the lack of a baolier relay - but the guys on the forum told me that you can stick a TCL script on the controller to activate a generic RF relay that's also available.
There's a similar range of products that does have a boiler relay:
but here's one:
I've not chased down any reviews, but it looks highly interesting.
I zoned the bedrooms using two second hand motorised valves and a dual mech timer (buying new was not cost effective and these were either bought off ebay or taken from stripout jobs). It works really well and was cheaper than modern zone valves and has the advanatges of not needing batteries (which some modern zones valves use) and can be easily overidden e.g. for a extra cold night centrally at the timer. Wiring was the main hassle but once done its in there forever.
Frankly zoning is what the energy saving lobbyists should be supporting rather than peddling dubious other schemes (like unreliable condensing boilers) as its low capital and *really* does make a saving.
Mitch
I'm not sure yet as I've not seen what's available but gut instinct, based on how the rooms are used, says it's going to end up pretty much per room.
Just a suggestion
It does look interesting! Thanks.
After quite a lot of Googling I've found
The pricing, though, seems to be higher unless you buy the 'Ultimate Bundle'.
Anyone used any of these devices?
Thanks, it's close but it doesn't have the boiler control that I would want.
One thing to bear in mind is that with, say, 6 zones, even when you are heating the whole house, there may only be 1 or 2 radiators needing heat at any one moment for much of the time. Many boilers won't cope well with such a tiny load, versus driving all radiators together on a 1:4 duty cycle which it does on a central stat system.
Having designed my system with separate upstairs and downstairs zones, the boiler's minimum modulating output is more than the output of the upstairs zone, causing it to cycle, and the model boiler I have is not particularly well designed for that. I compensate for this a bit by bringing on the downstairs zone slightly prematurely if the upstairs is circuit is getting nearly hot enough to trip off the burner, but that's not possible if the downstairs heating is off or it's already up to temperature. Pick a boiler with a very low minimum modulation, or one which can cycle on and off efficiently.
No experience of them, but:
Though looking a bit further:
Though I want my radiators to call for the boiler, and my underfloor heating not to (but the thermal store to do so). And the radiators to turn on a pump too.
In article , Andrew Gabriel writes
I think a micro zoned system (say room per zone) really needs to be done with a thermal store to smooth out the load a bit and avoid excessive boiler cycling.
For light loads I'm looking to steal heat back from my 210l H/W cylinder as a substitute for a full thermal store.
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