Not putting the heating on – how’s it going…?

^^^ currently DD is set at £480 a month, so around that, however we had new windows and doors installed late September so it may come down a bit..

how quickly it heats up can massively depend on the boiler spec. my (new build\well insulated, 140sqm) house has a 15kw boiler in it. The valient website suggests I need one approx double the size, and most people would probably get whatever they’re told to by british gas. Even in this cold snap the house is perfectly warm, but it does take an hour to add 1C to downstairs

I think there is either a problem with my heating system Vailiant EcoTech & 7 radiators. Or the house has started bleeding heat? In late 2010 when the whole of the UK showed as a white frozen mass & I was off sick following a double hernia OP. It was toasty warm (18degC in the coldest part of the house) by 10pm if the heating was off during the night.

Today I had it on till my earlier post and its been back on since 4pm after my fingers and nose got cold yet its only 14.3 in the coldest part and 17.1 in the lounge. 1960 semi with 450mm of loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, thermal lined roof structure. double glazed in 2003. Nothing has changed in the structure I know of. yet its cold a lot of the time?

First burn at 18:30 got the centre of the house from 16 up to 19. I’ve just added another two logs, that should satisfy Madame.

How quickly it heats up depends wheter the insulation is on the inside or outside and how much mass there is to heat up. Our insulation is on the inside so it responds quite quickly.

my (new build\well insulated, 140sqm) house has a 15kw boiler in it. The valient website suggests I need one approx double the size

I don’t think you do. Mine is 12kW, it can modulate down to 9kW, and that’s still far too much for my 2007 3-bed semi if I want to run it low and slow i.e. efficiently even in the current weather. If I crank up the temps so it’s delivering its 9kW it will warm the house up quicky but have a high return temp and be inefficient. However, if I turn the flow temp down it will hit its temp before the rooms are warm and start turning itself off and on frequently which is also inefficient.

Your 30kW boiler might be able to modulate down very low, but there’d be no point in having that much headroom I don’t think.

Re insulation when pointing my IR thermometer at the walls and cupboards in the kitchen at head height they are showing 18C, but the ones lower down are at about 14C. So the cold floor is really the problem here. I think that the builders put a hole in the inner wall for the utilities and didn’t seal it, letting cold air under the house, as the floor is much colder in the corner where the drainage goes.

How quickly it heats up depends wheter the insulation is on the inside or outside and how much mass there is to heat up. Our insulation is on the inside so it responds quite quickly.

Speed of response Also massively depends on delta T across the insulation.

Your house will warm up considerably quicker than 90% of folk on here as it’s about +10 in your corner of France right now is it not ? ….much of the UK is currently between -5/-10 right now.

I don’t think you do.

I don’t think I do either, but I guess if I had a 30kw boiler the house would be able to heat up really fast 🙂

…an old school concrete raft, with all the insulating properties of a Barretts built house, then you’re on a whole different calculation.

This is exactly what we’ve got, with a solid wood floor on top of most of it. You can feel the floor get noticeably colder within a metre or so of the external walls, and there’s quite a gradient from floor to ceiling. I’m not sure what to do about it, to be honest… the two options seem to be (a) dig it up and replace it with an insulated floor or (b) put insulation on top and raise the floor level. Both are enormously disruptive options…

I think the downstairs rads (hallway and kitchen) are obstructed, probably gunked up, but mildly at the moment. The flow temp from the boiler is 63 or so, the top of the hallway rad is 60 and the top of the kitchen one never gets above 50.

That’s today’s job, then. According to the internet, if I want to do a proper job I need to fit a filter and put some de-gunking chemical in it.

If you put de-gunking chemicals in, you’ll need to drain it off after a couple of weeks ! Then add inhibitor and silencer fluids.

We have given up trying to use the heating less after finding black mould appearing (mainly behind stuff piled on windowsills in the kids’ bedrooms). So we have cleaned it off as best we can, turned the heating up (still only to 15deg) and have the dehumidifier on full blast. No turkey for me at Christmas!

It’s always had inhibitor in but yes. Seems like de-gunking is a common thing so yes I could do it, and possibly without a filter. I’m not sure where I’d put one.

Well our brand new 4 bed detached with internal garage is certainly not what we expected when it comes to keeping warm.

I think we are bleeding heat from the garage door. There is a 10-15mm gap on the sides. The hallway thermostat dropped to 9 deg C last night, and my office which is upstairs and at the end opposite side of the house dropped to 12. With the heating on for a few hours we struggle to get it up to 18 with the rads wide open. The bedroom above the garage was 10 last night. I’m off to B&Q later to buy some insulation strips to try and solve the garage door issue.

Unless you have an insulated door then heat is pouring out no matter what the gap is.

Those are my thoughts. To be fair, I’ve just been to the car and it’s currently -8.

We don’t have a filter. My trusty Baxi Solo has been in the house from new, 27 years ago. It’s a tiny boiler.

It was kettling a fair bit in early autumn, and the water was inky black. Put in de-gunking fluid, left it a couple of weeks, drained down the systme till the water ran clear, then put in a load of inhibitor – bought 5 litres via Trade for £40, so shoved in half of it (suggested dose was 500ml), and also some boiler silencer. All is running nice and quiet again.

This is exactly what we’ve got, with a solid wood floor on top of most of it. You can feel the floor get noticeably colder within a metre or so of the external walls, and there’s quite a gradient from floor to ceiling. I’m not sure what to do about it, to be honest… the two options seem to be (a) dig it up and replace it with an insulated floor or (b) put insulation on top and raise the floor level. Both are enormously disruptive options…

Yeah, it’s a shock getting into a properly built and insulated house.
My current place in Sweden is 3 times the size of my last place in the UK, and the first three or four years i was here, my energy bills were broadly similar. 60-80 quid a month in the UK for electricity and gas, about 70-90 and maybe up to 100 a month Dec/Jan/Feb in Sweden. And i can assure you, it never got to -25 in the Midlands… One year we had nearly 3 weeks where the maximum temp we saw was -10.
Bills are now about 160-180 a month, but i’ve added 2 kids to the mix, and energy prices have gone up a lot!
Triple glazing and 300mm of encapsulated insulation in the attic, a heat reclaim/recirculation pump in the attic, GSHP and so on. All adds up.

Kids still wander off and leave the front door open when it’s 3 degrees and raining outside though.

Well our brand new 4 bed detached with internal garage is certainly not what we expected when it comes to keeping warm.

I think we are bleeding heat from the garage door. There is a 10-15mm gap on the sides. The hallway thermostat dropped to 9 deg C last night, and my office which is upstairs and at the end opposite side of the house dropped to 12. With the heating on for a few hours we struggle to get it up to 18 with the rads wide open. The bedroom above the garage was 10 last night. I’m off to B&Q later to buy some insulation strips to try and solve the garage door issue.

how are companies allowed to build houses like this?

A downside to having a colder house is possibility of frozen water pipes – our house is a converted Victorian industrial building so nowhere near current/any building regs but our cold water feed had a slug of ice that rattled through the boiler first thing this morning. The workshop tap also froze and just about managed to flow and unblock itself.

how are companies allowed to build houses like this?

They’ve ticked all the boxes on the check-list and not spent a penny more that they have to.

how are companies allowed to build houses like this?

have a look at pretty much any modern housing estate, it’s the norm on detached houses – integral garage or double, often with roller doors. That’s what we have (see earlier post on energy useage), and the room I am sat in right now was the 3rd bedroom and now an office and right above the garage. When we refloored the room last summer we lifted the carpet and underlay and laid lux vinyl ‘wood’ panels, with a layer of high spec insulating stuff under it, as the room always felt colder than others. It has made a big difference.

We also put some decent insulating edging on the door from the kitchen into the garage. In current weather the temperature differentials are huge – I have just checked – air temp outside is -5.5, in the garage it is +2.1 and in the office room it is 21.4. The last few nights, when the outside temp has gone to around -10, the garage has got down to +0.4 as a minimum – too cold for me to go in there on the Wattbike for sure !!

If you put de-gunking chemicals in, you’ll need to drain it off after a couple of weeks ! Then add inhibitor and silencer fluids.

We seem to have one rad downstairs with a large cold spot. Ideally I’d take it off and flush it through properly in the garden, but not doing that in sub zero temps!

Was wondering about trying some treatments….

I have used DS-40 in the past for limescale removal, but I don’t think I can use that again as our boiler heat exchanger weeps a bit and adding acid into the system risks making that worse…

Yeah, my mates internal garage had no proper insulation between it and the outside world, and no insulation between it and the rest of the house.
So the bathroom that was above it (and the pipes in the floor void) used to freeze occasionally.
The last leak resulted in half the garage ceiling coming down.
So there’s now something like 150mm of insulation, a new ceiling and a load of hooks for assorted outdoor kit and both internal walls have been insulated (not much, but better than nothing), and the garage door has been insulated. Still cold in there, but no where near as bad as it used to be. No frost on the bikes on a morning!

-8 here last night, temp in hallway dropped from 18c at 10pm to 14.5c at 7am this morning, think that’s okay for an 80s* built 4 bed detached 🤔

* new windows & doors + added loft insulation when I moved in 9yrs ago

Fortunately, my garage is detached ! Not insulated, so all I do is put in a dehumidifier, although the bikes that aren’t being used have silicone spray on this year – saving 200w from not using the dehumidifier

We have given up trying to use the heating less after finding black mould appearing

Found some of this in our bedroom, not coincidentally on one of the original Victorian single skin walls. There’s an obvious couple of centimetre hole in the corner of the room where the skirting boards meet which seems to be causing a draft. Would filling it up with caulk be a sensible low effort fix?

Expanding foam better for filling holes and gaps.

I’m off to B&Q later to buy some insulation strips to try and solve the garage door issue.

I doubt that’s going to have any effect TBH….. if it’s a roller door there will be gaps all over it and if it’s a steel up and over then it will be freezing!
You might be better insulating the rest of the house from the garage…. but that would be more expensive.

Well our brand new 4 bed detached with internal garage is certainly not what we expected when it comes to keeping warm.

Whats teh EPC rating? We moved into a new build and the EPC rating is pretty good (B). We do have a detached garage though (and very thick doors that go to outside)

do you not have am internal door to the garage from the house?

how are companies allowed to build houses like this?

Would you believe, because they lobby the government against increasing standards??

Leading housebuilder pushed for weaker climate targets

see also

the zero carbon homes standard, planned for 2016, required new homes to generate as much energy on-site from renewable sources as they used – a policy genuinely worth the hype. George Osborne killed the programme in 2015 at the behest of the construction lobby

and let’s not forget

The government has said it will not ‘impose’ measures to improve energy efficiency in existing homes as ‘British people are no-nonsense pragmatists who can make [their own] decisions’

We got to this point through choices. UK made choices. The only upside of this difficult winter is that hopefully more people see this.

Unless you have an insulated door then heat is pouring out no matter what the gap is.

I stuck a layer of what looks like foil-backed bubble wrap on the inside of my garage door and it helped a little bit. The giant gaps around the outside are now filled in with some foam strip but nothing will fix rest of the gaps short of replacing the door or bricking it up.

I would never buy anything from Hormann, they’re the epitome of cost-cutting, shoddy build quality and price-gouging for spare parts. A truly shit company.

UK house building with the big construction companies just isn’t up to it quality wise. Everything done to a price, trades not paid for time taken, all costed on a per property basis it seems hence the awful quality issues. Taking a bit more time over the important stuff like insulation and window/door fitment would go a long way to sorting out these issues but they won’t of course. It seems to be “the way it is” and house buyers just accept it.

Most garage doors in these parts are four panel things. The panels are 45/50mm thick steel sections filled with polyurethane foam. There are lip seals between the panels, on the sides, at the top and bottom. The internal frame/runners butts up to 100mm insulation nicely to cut the thermal bridge around the frame.

They cost about 800e but I picked this one up second-hand for 150e from someone converting their garage to a living room.

tried turning the boiler flow temp down as suggested above, house was far colder this morning (13 degrees). I know its supposed to be more efficient but surely if you have to have the heating on much longer its going to be about the same?

Also tried more fudging about with balancing. Big rads remains midly warm even with other rads restricted. I’m thinking I need to stop faffing and just leave it during this freezing period as I just seem to be making things worse!

Whats teh EPC rating?

It’s 84, so pretty good. There is a decent internal door to the garage that seems to be sealed well, even with a draught exluder at the bottom. Sticking some seal strips is a short term fix. I’ll look into getting an insulated door for next winter.

It’s 84, so pretty good.

evidence presented suggests the EPC rating is bollocks…

I know its supposed to be more efficient but surely if you have to have the heating on much longer its going to be about the same?

I find with ours it is a real balance – on freezing mornings (this week, peaking at -11) it comes on earlier and still isn’t quite up to the aimed for 18*c on time. Turn it down lower, and it isn’t getting enough heat into the house to maintain 18*c. Turn it higher and it heats up real quick and gets above 18*c at times. I find it do twiddle with it according to forecast a bit.

We got to this point through choices. UK made choices. The only upside of this difficult winter is that hopefully more people see this

Not a chance, it’ll be forgotten very quickly, as usual.

I find with ours it is a real balance – on freezing mornings (this week, peaking at -11) it comes on earlier and still isn’t quite up to the aimed for 18*c on time. Turn it down lower, and it isn’t getting enough heat into the house to maintain 18*c. Turn it higher and it heats up real quick and gets above 18*c at times. I find it do twiddle with it according to forecast a bit.

yeah, there’s obviously a sweet spot, but this changes according to conditions! I guess the whole point of OpenTherm on more modern boilers is that it works all this out automatically?