How to totally separate water heating from heating the rads (don't alway fire up the boiler)

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brianacox
brianacox ✭
in General Questions & Topics

I've had a Tado for a number of years (upgraded it too). We've got a Gledhill water store, which is heated by an oil boiler and two immersion heaters (using both solar and cheap overnight electricity)

I suspect that I need the system reconfigured/re-wired to operate as two distinct elements, so that:

  1. Hot water – where the Tado hot water schedule (when the water needs heating) just starts up our oil boiler, and heats up the water in the water store. There is a pump associated with this moving water from the boiler to the waterstore (and back)
  2. Heating – where the Tado heating schedule (when any TRV or the room thermostat needs heat ) starts up the pump (a second one) associated with the radiators.

At the moment the heating side (if heat is required) also tells the oil boiler to start up. Clearly it only does this when the water store isn’t up to temperate BUT I don’t want to do it at all.

The reason, as I mentioned, is that I’ve got two alternative sources of heat for the water store, 1) being solar electricity (excess electricity using an immersun diverter) being fed into the two immersion heaters (alternately) on the water store, 2) off peak cheap electricity between 00:30 and 04:30 which I can automatically (using the immersun) to start up the two immersion heaters, i.e. 2 immersion heaters x 3 kw x 4 hours = 24 kw of heating potential.

So at night, I will set the Tado Hot water to finish at say 8.00pm, but the heating to finish at 10.00pm. Because the house is warm at that time, and the water store hot at 8pm… there should be enough hot water to continue to heat the house until 10pm…. The water store will then be much cooler and with 350 litres of water there will be plenty of heat capacity for the cheap electricity to fully deploy.

Is this possible? how do I do it?

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