Room Too Hot - Thermostatic vent not working?

pjorg

Hello All,

Last year my wife and I bought our first home. It was built in 1840 and has one-pipe steam heat. The system was neglected and abused for apparently some time, and could not even really warm the house adequately. After having Mr. Matt Sweeney come in and take a look, and appropriate corrective action was taken, the house is now great...

...except that my daughter's bedroom, the smallest in the house, is now too warm. The radiator in this room seems to have been oversized by the previous owners to deal with the fact that it was so chilly in there (this was the impetus for calling for help to begin with), so now that things are working well it gets into the low 80s. Too hot. This is really the only room with this problem; the other rooms are fine.

I installed a thermostatic radiator vent a couple weeks ago, a Danfoss RA 2000 with a Gorton #D vent attached (yes, it's a straight connection on the vent, not 90°). My initial approach was to start all the way closed, figure out how many turns to get to all the way open, and then divided that in half to get the middle setting. Then I tried rotating it in quarter turns in the "cooler" direction and monitoring the temperature in the room.

There doesn't seem to have been any change. It's still hot.

Does anyone have any advice about how to tune this device? Is there a way I can test it to make sure it's actually functioning correctly?

KC_Jones

Put a smaller vent on it. A D vent is massive and what can happen is it vents so fast that by the time the TRV closes the room is already on it's way to overheating. With cast iron radiation you need to work ahead of it.

It's all about control and with a D vent you basically have none. It would be a fairly unusual situation to require a vent that size at all unless it's a huge house or apartment building with excessively long run outs.

pjorg

Okay, good note. I didn't know how big of a vent to use and so I figured "well, the TSV is doing all the heavy lifting so I'll just make the vent huge!" Whoops.

Will try something smaller. I presume the Gorton-style is okay though?

Thanks!

KC_Jones

Gorton's are fine, vent brands (to a point) are personal preference. Several good brands and for different reasons people like the different brands.

Kahooli

If you're springing for a new vent anyway, may as well get an adjustable kind to find the perfect balance point for you

You could also use something to partially block the vent hole to see how much of a reduction you need before buying a new vent.