What is the optimal way to arrange zones?
I have a home with 4 rooms
Living room has 3 radiators
Main Bedroom has 1
Hall has 1
Theres also three bathrooms, one for each bedroom and hall, they have radiators always open
All the rest radiators are tado valves
My main objective was to basically separate the house in two zones, living room vs rest, because the living room is full of bad windows that lose heat quickly, and so i could close that zone during the night and save some money.
Inside the app I still had each room separately, and I have set up the schedules accordingly, and it does kind of work wrt keeping the right temperatures in every room.
But I have noticed that the boiler runs very frequently.
My intuition is that, since I have now 4 rooms in the app, every room acts indepentently, so I have 4 consumers for my boiler, which makes sense then that it would receive many more requests than with the basic setup of one thermostat.
Is a consideration in the Tado algorithm? Trying to minimize heating requests while still achieving target temperatures in as many rooms as I have?
Or should i try to handle this myself? By trying to reduce the number of heat consumers, either grouping many rooms together, ex. having a "back" and "front" of house, or not allowing some rooms to call for heat through the zone controller settting?
Comments
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The simplest answer, as i see it, but not the cheapest, is:
1. To fit tado trvs on every radiator
2. To set the overnight temps for the living room and perhaps hall quote low, say 13 degrees, during the night. Then set the bedrooms lower during the day, but the temps are always on the slightly cool side until you have learned to trim them by time of day.
Eventually you'll find a suitable balance with the app. Have found that trvs really do save lots of money in 6 months.0 -
While I would agree that having TRVs on every rad is a good idea, I would add the following points
- check that your system doesn't need at least one radiator to be open. Many systems need an open rad to act as a bypass
- I wouldn't allow all TRVs to call for heat. Especially the bathrooms and hall. I would leave them as independent so you can set the temp but they only get heat if another room is calling
In my house, I have 7 rads with Tado TRVs plus hall rad is open and 2x bathroom rads are on manual TRVs. I initially had all Tado TRVs set with a zone controller so they could call for heat. As you've also seen, that can result in the boiler firing frequently.
I've adjusted the settings so only the living room and 3x bedrooms can call for heat. Result is a house that's still warm but the gas consumption has reduced and boiler is running less
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@Freelancer the best answer is ‘suck it and see’. For us, we have trvs everywhere and save over 50%.it really depends on how you use your heating.
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Thanks for the replies!
Just to mention I have been running this system like this for about a year now
We do have two radiators always open (in the bathrooms) as they just dont have a place to fit a trv. They are bathroom towel radiators if that makes sense, but still connected to the same network of course, not electric. So They play the role of the "bypass".
We have TRVs on all other radiators around the house.
The good thing is that temperature control is way better than the previous system. I have aqara temp sensors around the house and i can see that tado does indeed do the job of reaching the targets we set on the schedule we want.
But it is still very annoying to hear the boiler starting up every 5 minutes. If i manually "boost heating" for a while then the temperature overshoots the target and then i can have like 1-2 hours of quiet time.
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@Freelancer Glad to hear that the temperature control is better than the previous system. We concur in two family homes using Tado.
I've not seen the boiler in either of the two hones cycling as you describe? What make/model is your boiler? Is your Tado zone controller a Wireless receiver and what lights are'ON' when the boiler is cycling? Or is it the wired thermostat? Are you using a 'relay' connection to the boiler or 'Opentherm'?
Have you looked at the graphs to see if any room gives an indication of multiple start/stop from tado when the boiler is cycling? This is an example graph, from 12 rooms and Hot Water, for the room 'Study'. '
For a 'relay' connection to the boiler …
To eliminate the potential for an individual device or multiple rooms to 'call for heat' and cycling the boiler … could you try setting only one room (e.g. with the Tado thermostat) to the 'zone controller' and set the other rooms as 'independent'?
If the boiler cycling persists. To eliminate the final Tado device, switch the 'zone controller to another room. If the boiler continues to cycle, I'd be suspicious of an underlying problem elsewhere. E.g. Is this to do with pump overrun? Or Hot Water pre-heat on a combi boiler? Or perhaps to do with flow temperatures and the thermostat on a HW tank?
If the cycling stops. What happens when you add the 'zone controller' to one room at a time?
HTH.
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