Given that it’s bloomin’ freezing outside, I thought I’d write the first post on setting your heating controls. This post will be an overview to the whole set of controls and it’ll take a few more posts to cover the whole lot. For many this is a confusing subject so hopefully this post will help shed some light on a difficult area.
Ideally your heating system should have at least 3 basic controls: a boiler thermostat, a room thermostat and a programmer. We’ll deal with them in reverse order.
The programmer has overall control over when the boiler is switched on and off. It doesn’t have any temperature setting, just time settings. They come in varying degrees of sophistication from the most basic (which I unfortunately have) which can’t control the hot water and heating independently, to all singing and dancing, fully programmable digital devices. If the programmer is set to on, it doesn’t mean the boiler will be chugging away all of the time – the boiler should kick in and out in order to maintain a comfortable room temperature.
This overall house temperature is set by the room thermostat, which is usually found in the hallway or living room of a home. It senses the temperature of the room and tells the boiler to switch on if it is below the set temperature and switch off if it rises above it. As a result your room temperature will bobble up and down slightly above and below the set temperature. The room thermostat can’t override the programmer so it will only have an effect if the programmer is in its on phase.
The boiler thermostat is mounted on the boiler and controls the temperature of the water flowing out of the boiler and into the pipework and radiators. It tells the boiler how long to burn for in order to raise the water to the set temperature.This control is frequently overlooked and is usually the least well understood thanks to generally poor design.
In an ideal world, all of these three controls will work together in perfect harmony to maintain the temperature of your home. By setting them correctly you can achieve this with minimum energy consumption.
Clear? As mud? Post a comment below if you want me to clarify anything. I’ll be going into more detail on this very soon.
Comments
4 responses to “Heating Controls Pt 1 – Introduction”
A few misunderstandings that I have come across and might be useful to include are:
Differences between boiler temperature control and hot water thermostat (people don’t necessarily understand the difference if they don’t know that the hot water is heated ‘indirectly’ through a coil. Some diags would be good.
Also there is some confusion about what temperature the boiler temperature should be set to in different circumstances.
– In the summer for hot water only
– depending on the type of radiators you have, might be worth some info on this with some pictures.
– Also guessing you will go through the different types of boiler at some point but could you mention modulating boilers so people know what extra value these are?
Good point on the modulating part. I’ll knock up a boiler post this weekend.
[…] boiler thermostat also needs to be adjusted so that the flow temperature (the temperature of the water leaving the […]
[…] I’m going to stick my oar in and describe how I think the programmer and room thermostat (see Pt 1 for a description of these controls) should be set in a […]