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.