marshian

I'd put a PIV unit it and just run it over night - you could probably run it on the lowest speed (2 W consumption) and at that rate it's not going to cost much at all to heat the incoming air We run ours on setting 3 overnight (7W) so that's 30 Litres per sec in a 291 m3 House volume it gives us an ACH of 0.37 We have tried it on a lower speed but we get condensation on the inside of the windows in the main bedroom so we'd rather have a higher ACH and no condensation and a little more energy spend heating the cooler air that is being forced into the house

Hmm that's interesting - Thank you A double version of what I currently have 1600 x 472 has an claimed output of 1579 w I could easily increase the height to 1800 x 472 and that has a claimed output of 1750 w It seems neither will get me to target (closer but no cigar as they say)

I'm debating upgrading the two bathroom rads They are verticals - I purchased them in 2023 when I was still using the previous glow worm boiler that couldn't cope with a flow temp below 45 and I had to fit aftermarket diverters to make them work properly (picture below was from a thread on rubbish quality rads) Last winter I was transitioning from scheduled heating at higher temps to 24/7 with weather compensation so the bathroom temps were a lot warmer Now I've been running flow temps in the winter of low to mid 30's the bathrooms only reach 21 deg C - personally I find that OK but Mrs Alien feels that they need to be warmer (she does however like a long bath. They are rated at 0.89 kW at T50 - heat loss of the bathrooms is pretty much identical at 220 w What I'm trying to get my head round is how much larger a rad I need to get to a target of 23 Deg C with my current flow temps (I know I can get a double version of the on I have and Mrs Alien is happy with the asthetics.............. The current rads wouldn't go to waste as one could replace a towel rail rad in downstairs toilet and another in the utility room (both the towel rails used to be in the bathrooms but couldn't get the rooms to temp at 45 deg flow temps so were relocated to replace 1980's single panel single convectors rads rather than wasted) The utility room in particular has additional heat sources, tumble drier, Freezer, Fridge and washing machine so needs very little additional heat I might ask ChatGPT to see if it can work out what wattage I need to hit 23 seeing as that's the current trend for everything PS No the rooms wouldn't be continually heated to 23 - I'd manage the rooms temps with a setback when not bathing!!!

Avg energy consumption was 3.81 kWh Total Consumption was 38.1 kWh (38.1 divided by 10 hrs)

OAT overnight -4.4 Deg C highest temp in the day -0.2 Deg C but it wasn't there for long All internal room temps held nice and stable Boiler ran from Midnight to just before 10am with one burn (it finished that burn just before the HW cycle was scheduled probably due to OAT warming up or the modulation blips threw the flow temp over target. Avg energy usage for that period 3.81 kWh That's quite impressive considering the modulation hiccups it has on a regular basis Looking like my heat loss calcs are a little more than actual ~4.25 kWh @ -2.5 OAT From my Octopus account Gas usage over the 24 hr period Overall the whole day saw the boiler do 7 cycles (normal is 20 to 24) Bloody modulation blips annoy me still..............

It really depends on age - both my Loft tanks (CW and F&E) have ball cock controls that are 45 years old - they've had between them 2 washers in 30 years - the whole thing takes 5 mins to strip down - it's all brass construction and will probably outlast me Most modern plastic stuff is crap - made to a price point and doesn't last long If it isn't an old brass unit I agree replace the whole thing and stick an isolation valve in the feed so the next time it needs replacing you don't need to turn off the water supply to the house

Oh that's rather neat but I have a question, related to it When I did my heat loss with an on-line process (heat engineer software) I used the internal wall measurements but your sheet seems to require external wall dimensions - is that normal practice?

Hard water area? Ball valve sealing washer is worn (or gone hard)

Similar here OAT overnight -4.4 Deg C All internal room temps held nice and stable overnight Boiler ran from Midnight to just before 10am with one burn (it finished that burn just before the HW cycle was scheduled probably due to OAT warming up or the modulation blips threw the flow temp over target. Avg energy usage for that period 3.81 kWh That's quite impressive considering the modulation hiccups it has on a regular basis Looking like my heat loss calcs are a little more than actual ~4.25 kWh @ -2.5 OAT

Perfect summary

House is 1/3 of yours 113m2 however it is a stupid T shape with many rooms having 3 external walls which in a 1980’s house hurts. what I would say however is heating 24/7 with or without setbacks for me is actually not much of an increase on heating via a schedule with much higher flow temps for shorter periods morning and night - house temp swings were dramatic - far too easy to overheat the house and it never felt as comfortable as it does now. (Less than £50 a year from memory) what really triggered the move to 24/7 was that I would run the CH at the weekend all day and Monday would always be really low usage compared to the rest of the week - simple when I thought about it - I’d warmed up the internal fabric of the house over the weekend and on Mondays it gave it up again…..

WHS ^ I did manual WC for nearly 2 years on scheduled heating - it worked quite well - not as good as WC but really only a few days a year when you really need to wind up the flow temps rest of the time a happy medium works well

From my non technical viewpoint and I'm going to phase it as such For the burner to be running at 100% then the water flowing thro the boiler must be taking that heat input - which means the return temp water is cool enough to enable the boiler to "have at it" Only when the heat capacity of the return flow is less than the full power of the boiler will the boiler modulate down (OK it may rise above target set point before it does that but that will be in the programming of the boiler MBU) Basically you have a circuit of water (Pipes and rads) and it's taking a fair old time before the return water starts to warm up enough to cause the boiler to modulate down.

I'm pretty OCD when it comes to pipework/wiring now - If I've had a floor up I normally take a photo of pipework/wiring while the floor is up Then I'll mark out the "unsafe" zones with permanent marker on the floor - the photo is especially useful if you then go and tile the floor and cover the "unsafe" zone markings (Always handy to be able to refer to it if you ever need to put a fixing in) Of course I haven't always done the above - I don't have a picture of the master bedroom floor before it went down - when it was laid I also didn't mark the floor for any pipework or wiring. There is one section that always has a little creak - wakes up Mrs Alien if I've come in late having had a few beers She wanted new carpet so we ordered carpet and arranged for a fitter - day before we emptied all the furniture, cut up and removed all the old carpet and underlay - the morning of the carpet fitting I walked on the creaky bit and it reminded me to throw another screw or two at it - as I looked at the floor it was bloody obvious I'd missed two screws out Creaky floor resolved - new carpet and underlay laid OK you all know what happened next.......... well not actually next as water takes a little while to escape if you've put a self cutting screw thro a copper heating pipe and plasterboard is pretty good at holding water - screws that held it to the ceiling joist not so much

I’d stick with the boiler until end of life (or close to it) just from an environmental perspective (not replacing something that is still functional and effectively a very bloody good and efficient boiler).

I can go one better (or worse depending on viewpoint) Utility room sink waste was slow to drain - not unusual as Mrs Alien has a small tendency to slightly overdose on the washing powder so over a period of time it tends to clog up the drain so a strip down and clean out was required Having learnt from previous occasions the last time I rebuilt the section I put a couple of strategic compression joints in what is mainly all solvent welds. sections removed and then rodded/scraped/chiselled out and rinsed thro in the sink. The plan was drop all the muck and water into a bucket under the sink…… Off course only a complete idiot would pull the plug out without having placed a bucket in the cupboard under the sink……. oh how I laughed!!!!!

Ouch what caused that - clearly not a dart?

Christ - that sounds painful but progress looks good

I have Wiser - went down the whole micro management with 13 smart TRV’s (one for every room/rad) complicated schedules, heating only the rooms when they were needed - it worked but was horrible to manage. All now removed and replaced with PICV and dumb TRV heads the Wiser hub remains with one roomstat - running 24/7 with WC - if I ever get round to connecting it to the boiler it will give me remote access to turn off or turn on the boiler and that’s all I need - however the boiler has it’s own app and it’s easier just to use that when I need to.

I have very similar one - have you tried powering it down Mine always re-gens if the power is accidently turned off Bottom of the screen on mine normally shows 4 blocks which is the state of the resin and then it re-charges overnight unless you catch it out with abnormal usage. Only other advice I can give is keep a careful eye on the pipework - Mine decided to weep over a few months - the crimp had started to fail

What are your L2 settings? I would have thought it was pretty important to have the correct parameters??

Seen that before - my take away is that above 60 mins cycle time there is no efficency degradation - anything below that there is and the shorter the cycle the greater the eff loss

Well for the last three days the boiler has been a very naughty little pixie (Note - It is not range rated at all) Despite falling outside temps the cycles per day have steadily increased - the cycle lengths have shortened Date - No' Cycles - Avg Cycle Length 23/12 - 27 - 21.9 mins 24/12 - 32 - 34 mins 25/12 - 34 - 22.7 mins Boiler behaviour is basically intitial purge and burn up to 58% and then modulate down to 10.8% - it'll sit there for a while before starting to ramp up to 25 -35% even tho the flow temp is already at the WC setting - it'll hit temps of 4 or 5 deg higher than the target temp before shutting down - the return temp would then drive a restart 10 mins later. Once the boiler gets into this spiral of increased cycles with shorter burns it's always defeated my efforts to get it back in line but I don't always have the time to try different things. Normally it goes away with a sudden change in outside temps - either a warmer day or a cooler day. Yesterday I took the boiler off weather compensation mode and set it to a fixed temp setting - boiler did the same thing, I range rated it to minimum - boiler ignored the RR'ing and continued to randomly ramp up. I've powered the boiler down - several times - made no difference I set it back to Weather Compensated flow temps - still the same In the end I turned the whole system off for an hour and then restarted it late yesterday evening. Overnight normal behavior is resumed...... It hasn't missed a beat all day As of 16:30 today Date - No' Cycles - Avg Cycle Length 26/12 - 15 - 40 mins Should end the day at 22 or 23 cycles (one of those would have been HW) Which is exactly as it should be. So I think it's time to schedule some stops into it's activities as opposed to an overnight setback temp My Wiser controller isn't currently linked to the boiler (it has a link wire providing power to both perm live and switched live but a single core cable from the Wiser Hub will fix that and then I'll schedule two hours of downtime for the boiler 1 hour overnight and 1 hour in the daytime I appreciate that the above sounds a bit mental for a WC system but I'm not always at home to see and hear it ramp up but as the Boiler App provides me the total number of hours run and the number of boiler starts I've been noting down the readings every day at the same time so I can see when it's either cycling more than normal or cycle length is shorter than normal

The issue there is the dumb controls are all @EinTopaz requires for the way he uses the heating system

I think I've said this before - be careful if you end up with a DT greater than 20 Deg at the boiler most modern condensing boilers really don't like this much and will do all sorts of things to try and protect themselves. If you are getting a wide DT with a slower pump speed then you could probably lower the flow temp to tighten the DT (at the expense of slightly cooler rads but I wouldn't think the difference in rad temp between 60 and say 55 would be detectable by touch)