What's the best settings for Tado and my boiler?
About my setup:
Boiler: Worcester Bosch Greenstar i24 Junior.
I have tado radiator and thermostats in every room in the house except the bathroom which heats when any other rooms are heating.
The kitchen only has a small radiator, and the kitchen is in an extension off the house so it's always the coldest room. Therefore I have set that room to always be at a target temp with no zone controller so it always tries to get to a certain temperature only when other rooms are heating.
The bedroom radiator is against an interior wall and does not heat effectively, therefore with that, I have home assistant turn on a horizontal fan that sits on top of it whenever it's heating, which helps that room heat a lot better.
Other rooms (Living room, dining room, and spare room) all heat quickly and maintain temperature for a good time.
Question:
Currently, I turn on heating for the rooms that are in use as and when needed, and have the dial set to 5 on the boiler so the rooms heat quite quickly.
What I'm trying to figure out is what's the most cost effective way to heat the house? Should I be having the boiler set to a lower number on the dial and having rooms heat all day to target temp? Should I have it on high and heat twice a day? What do you think would be best?
Answers
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First and most important, have a look at this video,
- Get More Heat From Your Radiators ~ System Balance
- grab some spanners and rebalance your radiators, to ensure that enough thermal output comes out of the rads in those cold areas.
- If after balancing it all, and redoing it a couple of days later, those radiators cant perform, recommend you replace them with ones of the same width and height, but with double or triple panels. When one chooses radiators of the same dimensions it is much easier to swap out the lower energy one with one that produces more energy.
- Once those end rooms have the right sizes of rads and balanced, then consider tweaking down the temp of the boiler.
- Oversized radiators running at lower temperatures are more efficient than small rads running at higher temperature.
This is important, the less time your boiler is running and providing heat, the more money you save.
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Hello @webb1234 I'd agree with @policywonk.
If you're having to use a fan to get enough heat off a radiator a) it's under-sized for the room, b) too little water flow, c) the room has excessive heat loss.
a) Sounds like the rad in your kitchen is too small. There are on-line calculators for calculating suitable rad sizes
a) The rads in our previous home were too small and the heating had to be ON 24/7 during winter. This was extremely inefficient and expensive.
b) Are the rads in other rooms very hot? Rebalancing may help.
b) Pipework diameter is important for water flow. Very rough kW load numbers for pipework and attached rads: 15mm=4.25kW, 22mm=12kW, 28mm=35kW. It is quite common to find the extension builder has simply Tee'd off the riser pipework next to another rad. Rebalancing may help.
b) The original pipework may be too small to provide enough flow for the additional rad? New pipewoek may be a more difficult answer.
c) In this home, we replaced two outside glazed aluminium doors in the 1970s extension and the winter room temperature increased by 5 deg C.
HTH.
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