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I'm sure this has been done before but...
I live in a standard build, 12yr old detached house. Double glazed, cavity wall and loft insulation. Gas fired combi boiler and thermostatic controls on all radiators and main thermostat on the wall.
At the moment heating kicks in for a couple of hours in the morning then again from 4pm - 10pm in the evening.
Is this the most efficient way of doing things or would we be better of leaving heating on all day at lower temperature? I wonder if keeping heating 'ticking over' is cheaper than heating up a house once it has cooled down? Same question applies overnight but I don't really like the idea of heating on at night.
Ticking over all day = heat loss all day, fantastic if you don't mind heating the great outdoors.
Depends on your insulation really. Good insulation and you can hold the temp over the day cheaper than ramping up. Give it a go read your meter and try.
Depends a lot on the building I think.
The office I work in - the heating is turned off at the end of Thursday to save money over the weekend when the place is empty. When it's turned on again on Monday morning it takes until Thursday for the building to reach the desired temperature, then it's turned off again for the weekend 🙄
If you have a poorly insulated house it will cost a bundle to keep it ticking over all day & as joao3v16 says it will take a long time to get it back up to temp if switched off in the day.
If you have a well insulated house, it will still cost you more money to keep it ticking over all day (heat loss is related to difference in temp between indoors & outside), but will be able to get back up to temp quicker.
There is no "normal" situation where it is cheaper to keep a standard domestic boiler ticking over all day rather than turning it off when the house is empty, if you find it too cold when you return from work, just set the time clock a little earlier.
Great, thanks!
if you have a stone built house then there might be a heatsink issue
i used to live in a stone built cottage with 3 foot thick solid stone walls and a solid concrete floor in a steading conversion
it used to be a nightmare to heat up as the walls/floor would steal alot of the heat , once the walls were warm the house would stay warm easily and heat up infinately quicker.
in that particular house it was cheaper to keep the house at a minimum temperature and heat up from that than let it cool right down - which we had to do over the christmas holidays as we ran out of oil and were leaving for 2 weeks so decided best to drain heating than risk leaving it off. once the walls had let out all their heat it took a few days to get the house back working for us.
actually quite glad we moved from there.
Boiler temp should be set high, rad temps set as required and what should happen is the rads cut out when up to temp and then once the return to the boiler is close enough to to out let the boiler shuts down too - or at least this is the theory.
As mentioned above low setting all day long is a modern myth and will cost you a fortune.
I'm much the same. 1890s stone-built terrace; takes a good couple of days to reach a normal temperature if the heating's been off a while (eg, holiday). Once warm, keeping it warm is relatively trivial.
The physics agrees with the posters above. However, anecdotally people report savings if they leave it on all the time. I'm not sure why this would be or if they are just making it up.
Ours is currently on all the time, but that's because we were having to try everything to keep our 18mo daughter asleep all night. We have tried this before as an experiment but the difference in bills was too small to be seen in the normal variation anyway.
One thing I noticed though - after a week or so of heating on all the time, we had to turn the thermostat down to 18 from 20, it was getting too warm.
Most efficient way to use my heating?
surely, turn it off?
depends on the programmer you have as well i guess ....
i have a programable thermostat with 4 or 6 different time zones during the day and then different times for weekend.
with a dial on the wall - its completely different and horrible kettle of fish!
Leaving it on all the time ticking over will only be beneficial if once its turned off the temeprature of the house falls and then keeps falling! In most normal houses the temp will drop to around ambient and then stay there once the heating is off.
The father in law is retired and has plenty of time to carry out extensive research into topics like this.
The answer is that it is considerably less expensive to put the heating on only when you need it
He has the all the bills in a folder to prove it 😉
That sort of father in law is excellent
Yes he is a good bloke. Also does things such as producing bags of pre-1947 silver coins which he then sells at 10x face value.
£350 for £32 of coins is a result in my book
a friend of mines father used to record how long each of their light bulbs used to last 😯 & at least weekly if not daily electricity consumption but then again he did work for British Standards
I have mine on for quite a while[6:30-7:30 & 4-11] on low [16-18 degrees] in a 1950's mid terrace house. It reduced last winters bill by £100 for the quarter compared to the previous year. Cooking in the kitchen heats the house up a bit further. Used to just have the heating blasting from about half hour before I came home but it took ages to heat the house up. find it better to heat the envelope and keep it warm.