Welcome! Here are the website rules, as well as some tips for using this forum.
Need to contact us? Visit https://heatinghelp.com/contact-us/.
Click here to Find a Contractor in your area.

How best to manage my gas central heating - odd house layout.

RafeDonson
RafeDonson Member Posts: 1
I rent a house, and have a combi boiler - it's been replaced so it's now a fairly modern one, with LED readouts, compared to the old one which was dials only. But I'm still wondering how best to heat my house, and how to tweak the system?

My house has an odd layout. It's a fairly thin three story house, an old converted weavers house, with lounge on the top flood, bedroom and bathroom on the middle floor and kitchen on the bottom floor.

I have radiators with TRV valves in the bathroom, bedroom, lounge and kitchen - the kitchen one being the biggest ones. The bathroom, bedroom and lounge have doors I can close, but the kitchen has no door so opens up to the mid floor landing which in turn opens up to the top floor landing. But the thermostat is in the kitchen.

I'm in the lounge the most, so I'd like to keep that room the warmest, but I don't want the rest of the house to be icy. I've tried various things so far - I've tried..

1) Putting all the radators up till 5 and lowering the thermostat
2) Leaving the thermostat at 18, but putting the lounge radiator at 5, and the others at 2.
3) Turning down the central heating temp dial on the boiler itself, to about 4.

But none of these seem to have made much difference. Can anyone tell me which of these should be the most efficent? The main issue I have is that the thermostat is in the kitchen, the room I tend to need heated the least. The kitchen's also connected to the upstairs and top floor landing, so presumably any heat in the kitchen would radiate upstairs.

Advice would be appreciated.

Comments

  • SWEI
    SWEI Member Posts: 7,356
    edited January 2016
    Some details on the boiler (make, model, perhaps a photo showing the surrounding piping and valves)?

    Barring nothing amiss there, I would probably suggest the following:
    • Turn the thermostat up as high as it goes.
    • Turn all the TRVs up as high as they will go.
    • Adjust the heating curve on the boiler controls until the coolest room is comfortable regardless of the outdoor air temp.
    • Turn down the TRVs in any rooms that are too warm.
    Once this is balanced (it can take several weeks) then turn up the boiler curve a bit and turn all the TRVs down a point or two. This will give you some usable range on all the TRVs. Set the Thermostat a couple of degrees warmer than you actually want the room, which will turn it into a high limit control.
    Rich_49Gordy
  • Jamie Hall
    Jamie Hall Member Posts: 23,168
    Not quite sure what's available on your side of the pond (at least I assume that you are in the UK?), but on this side of the pond there are a number of wi-fi or remote enabled options for thermostats -- such as this nifty gadget: http://yourhome.honeywell.com/en/products/thermostat/portable-comfort-control

    There are also thermostats with remote wireless sensors.

    Would such a thing do what you want? Seems to me that you could then control the system with a remote sensor in the lounge, and dial the other radiation down to whatever seemed comfortable...
    Br. Jamie, osb
    Building superintendent/caretaker, 7200 sq. ft. historic house museum with dependencies in New England
  • Gordy
    Gordy Member Posts: 9,546
    Recommend Kurts advice as to dialing in the ODR. This will give you the lowest water temp needed, but yet high enough for the coldest room. Then you can dial everything else back in the warmer rooms.

    That will be as efficient as it gets. The trvs will control the flow, and the thermostat becomes redundant component only making sure other thermal loads do not overheat the space.