Set points on thermostats.

Long gone are the days when your central heating system was either on or off.

When they were on they were controlled by a single thermostat that you had to either turn up if you were too cold, or down of you were too hot.

The modern thermostat controllers are now on all the time and you set the temperature at the level you want at a certain time of the day, so for example, when you get up the set point is 21 degrees C, but when you go to work the set point is set at 14 degrees C, when you come home from work the set point may be 18C increasing to 21C when it is time to sit down to watch TV, and when it is bed time it is reduced to 14C.

Most well insulated houses probably do not get below 14 degrees and so the boiler/heating system never comes on, but if it does for some reason then the boiler comes on for a short period to maintain that temperature. This is actually more efficient than having your heating system have to heat the house from a much lower starting point.

Let's say the house does get to 10C, and the system didn't come on until half an hour before you wanted it to get to 21C, it would have to work an awful lot harder and probably wouldn't make it in time whereas if it has been set at 14C, then it doesn't have to work any where near as hard to get up to 21C.

There are many thermostat/controllers on the market and most of them work to this principle. We recommend a few which we sell on our website www.multiheat-infrared-heating.co.uk

Salus RT500RF

Do you have electric heating - then zone your house!

Most central heating systems are just that - central heating.

They have a central control unit that will work on a timer and thermostat, and at the allotted time it will turn your heating system and warm your house to the temperature as stated on the thermostat. We can add additional control to each room by adding a thermostatic valve, but these are normally changed manually when wanting a room to be either warmer or cooler than the central thermostat.

If you turn the valve up and forget to turn it back down again, then the central heating system, when it next comes on, will warm that room up to its new setting. Quite a cumbersome way to control the heat in your home.

With electric heating there is no need to have a central control system, you can have a timer / thermostat on each electric heater, and therefore in each room/zone, or you can have 2 simple zones, one upstairs one downstairs, or 3 zones, or 4 and each zone can be set to come on at the time most suitable to that zone.

As an example, if you never visit your living room in the morning, then why heat it? You can set the living room to come on early in the evening and to keep the room warm until you go to bed, but in the morning the room stays cold, unlike the centrally heated home where that room will be heated in the morning regardless of the fact that you never go in there.

Are these controllers expensive - not really, you can find them available for £30+ each.

We have a few controllers on our website that will give you some idea of how each zone can be controlled - you find them here CONTROLLERS! Of course, if you have any questions you can contact us via our website contact page!

Do you zone your heating system?

I was talking to a potential customer today about how to make your heating system much more efficient. This will work with any heating system, not just our infrared heaters, and the more control you have the more efficient you can make it.

You can create a zone for each room in the house and set the heaters to come on in that room half an hour before it will be used and turn off when it is empty. This is quite a tough thing to anticipate because while we are all creatures of habit we are not that consistant.

However, if I use just a two zone example, you will see my point better.

A central heating system will heat the whole house, the boiler comes on and all of the radiators will warm up, and the house warms up nicely. Of course we can have thermostatic controls on each radiator so that once the room reaches its optimum temperature it turns off the need for heat, but it will heat up none the less.

In a zoned house you can have a zone system for say upstairs and down stairs. The upstairs heating comes on half an hour or so before the downstairs heating and goes off earlier as well. This means that whilst everyone is upstairs there is no wasted heating requirements downstairs. The same happens in reverse in the evening - whilst the family are downstairs in the warm, the upstairs heating is off until half an hour before people go to bed.

You should be able to see that there will be an energy saving for the times the unused zones are not being heated whereas with a central heating system the whole house is heated even if the family are in one zone.

This can be refined further, by making the guest bedroom a zone of their own, or by making the living room a separate zone so that if it is unused in the morning it isn't heated until the evening.

I hope that made sense, if not and you want to talk it over some more, please call me or Heather in our office on 01237 451759.

Timers and efficiency!

We all set our alarm clock to ensure that we get up at the right time every morning as we have plenty of things to do each day and some things just have to be done at the right time.

No point getting up and dropping the kids off at school at 10am, when classes start at 9am.

We all understand how timers can improve efficiency. From egg timers to tell us when the egg is is just right, to the microwave that pings after 30 seconds to tell you the cup of milk is hot, the cooker that turns itself on when you are at work to start cooking that stew ready for when you come home.

Of course a lot of us have central heating, the timer turns the heating on at such time so that when the alarm goes off, the house is nice and warm, we have hot water too and just before we leave the house the timer turns the whole lot off and will turn it all on again just before we are due to come home again.

Central heating though is just that - central - you have one controller that controls the whole house - and the whole house gets heated up twice a day regardless of whether we use each & every room. Yes, we have thermostatic valves on our radiators but do we remember to turn them down as we go to bed and turn them up again when we want more heat, no - we like to have these things controlled for us.

So, here we go, a sales pitch - not just for our infrared heating panels but any form of heating solution that does not have a central boiler - you can use timers/controllers to zone certain parts of your house!

Bedrooms can be turned off earlier in the morning & turned on later in the evening, the kitchen can be heated later in the morning & earlier in the evening and the living room can be left off in the morning and come on a bit later than the kitchen in the evening! So, instead of everywhere being heated at the same time your rooms are heated when you use them thereby keeping your energy costs down.

Controllers can be simple plug in devices to fancy controllers that have an "Early Start Function". Can be used in automatic mode only. The thermostat calculates the optimal time to start heating in order to obtain the desired temperature by the set point time. The thermostat re assesses the start time daily based on previous days results.

How clever is that?

Call us on 01237 451759 to find out more!

Multiheat are specialists in electric heating using far infrared heating panels