heating controls & valves

Heating is all about comfort and control. It’s nothing to do with economy. For sure, use it wisely, but remember that it’s there for your convenience, not an experiment to see how cold you can get before you reluctantly switch it on. It’s highly likely that your annual telephone bill is comparable to a percentage of your heating bill - yet you don’t electrify your phone to stop your teenage daughter from using it for hours. Neither do you probably think much of your internet charges or your satellite TV subscription.

For much of my working life I have tried to get clients of mine to analogise their heating with their cars. You wouldn’t leave your car in the garage all summer then expect it to start on the first cold morning. I would like a pound for every circulating pump I have had to coax into life every autumn after it’s been left in sludge-water for four months without movement. Would you expect your car to last for 40 years or more? I’ve been amazed at just how people expect their heating systems to go on forever. Many of the systems around today were installed in the 60s. Okay, many of them have had their boilers replaced, but the pipes and the radiators were manufactured before the mini skirt. These are steel radiators, remember, with water and air in them. I leave you to guess what happens with these combinations. It always amazes me to be greeted with open jaws when I tell people their systems are finished. The disappointment at the £3,000 investment required is quite evident. Yet they think nothing of losing this amount every year in the depreciation of the value of the family car!

Self build or total renovation gives you the opportunity to get the heating system best for your home and the most practical to use. So let’s first of all remind ourselves what should be the first priority, and strangely, what is never treated as such by installing engineers - controllability. The ability to control your heating properly is going to make all the difference between a great system and a rotten one. It’s also going to reflect on the running costs as well. Though, as I say, that’s a minor consideration.

All to often you’ll see a complete heating system controlled by a room thermostat - usually sited in the hall or living room. This is the primary mistake of 99% of installing engineers. Many people leave their system programmers set to ‘constant’ and adjust the room thermostat to how they feel and when they want the heating system on and off. Many members of my own family do this! Siting a room thermostat (often referred to as an ‘air stat’) in the hall or living room is only ever going to sense the temperature in that one spot. It tells you, or the system controls, absolutely nothing about the spare room or the bathroom temperatures. It could be literally freezing, or over-heating. What good is that?

Apart then, from a central timer, the room temperatures should be independent of each other. Each room should be able to ask for, and receive, heating whether or not any other part of the system is on or not. In fact, you could go further and incorporate a timer into the room as well. That way, the room can be set for time and temperature completely independent of the rest of the system - day or night. This is sometimes essential in rooms containing the elderly, the ill, or new-born children.

You shouldn’t worry about set temperatures as most combined room thermostats and timers have what is called a night-time ‘set-back’ temperature. This will bring the heating on to a set level. Similarly, a ‘frost protection’ will bring the heating on should the room (or system) fall to a preset temperature. My own system has this, and it’s set for 15 degrees Celcius. Hence my home never falls below this temperature at any time - 365 days of the year. On very cold mornings this acts as an ‘anticipator’ - as it has already heated the house to 15 degrees. It therefore has less of a job than it otherwise would have done bringing the house up to temperature before we all get up. This means I can set the timer to come on later than my neighbours might have to - as their home would have to heat up from cold; being off for perhaps the previous six hours or more.

I also advise my clients to have the hot water set to 24 hours or ‘constant’ for the winter period. This is because the system is expected to cope with heating both at the same time otherwise. It should easily do so, but I believe it’s better to concentrate the heating on just that - heating. The hot water will already have heated itself. This costs a little more in fuel - but not much - and the convenience of permanent hot water outweighs it anyway. Why people put up with cool baths late at night “because all the water’s been used by the daughter” baffles me.

The thermostat will switch the system off when it has heated the tank and it’s highly unlikely to come on again all through the night, so noise and waste are kept to a minimum, and comfort and convenience are kept to a maximum!