Lurkalot

I'm planning on installing some sort of ventilation to the upstairs of our house, not sure if MVHR is worth it. The reason for wanting it is just for ventilation, I seem to sleep better with the window open as long as there’s a bit of a breeze to move the air around, but the bedroom window is at the front of the house so there’s a lot of road noise in the mornings. The bedroom humidity gets high overnight, and we get condensation on the window most mornings if it’s closed. We also have an en suite with no extractor fan and the main bathroom extractor fan has stopped working too. The house was built around 2008 and not air tight etc, but as I’m planning on doing something to the ventilation anyway it feels like saving some heat is better than nothing, and I just like the idea of MVHR. It would probably be cheaper to just get two new humidity controlled extractor fans for the en suite and bathroom, and some sort of ducted ventilation for the bedroom. I really don’t know how efficient an MVHR system would be in this situation as I have no idea what the air tightness level of the house is, although given there is an open fireplace downstairs it probably is quite low. Any advice on how useful it would be? And if so what system to go for, I can find a Vent Axia HR100R for just 280 euros, has anyone got any experience with these?

Yes, definately will have to do a big upgrade soon with a new boiler, TRV's and controller. Probably not going to be cheap though so it might have to wait a month or two. Until then I'll try balancing radiators and checking with a thermometer as DavidFrancis suggested to see if there are any signs of sludge. Is it correct to aim for a difference of about 12 degrees celcius on each radiator?

Thanks everone who helped, I now have a Salus wireless thermostat in our living room and the room is keeping to a better temperature and I can already tell the boiler is running less of the time. I'll have to keep an eye on how much oil is being used now. I spoke to a plumber who's had a look and it is not a condensing boiler, that will be something that we will have to change too. The plumber luckliy had done some work on one of the other houses in the same estate which was plumbed the same way and could tell us how it was done. The two manual valves on that pipe in the photo control the flow to the radiators, one for upstairs and one downstairs. This does allow us to have just the hot water on by manually closing both valves. He's going to give us a quote for upgrading to automatic valves connected to a controller that can assign seperate times for each zone. I have also noticed there a big difference in how hot the radiators get, I'm assuming this is down to needing to be balanced?

No sorry maybe i described that wrong, there's no underfloor heating, just two pipes from the boiler that both are routed through the concrete floor of the boiler room. I can see where the pipes go up to the first floor in the utility room, but all the plumbing for the ground floor radiators is under the concrete floor. The boiler does heat the hot water as well as the radiators. The problem I have is working out where the pipes in this image go, there's 6 of them, one of them has the two taps on with a join to another pipe. Not sure why, anyone have any ideas? Boiler is a 2011 grant euroflame 50-70, doesn't say on the label if it is condensing or not and from what I can see online it was available in both types, is there a way to see if it is condensing or not? Is there a better option than a TRV that does control heat output? Thanks all

How easy is to to fit thermostatic valves, at the moment they just have manual ones? I wish I could, I don't understand it myself though, from the boiler two pipes go straight into the slab, then in the utility room there are a few pipes going from the floor to ceiling but I can't work out what each one does

I hadn't realised you could get wireless time controller thermostats but now I see there are quite a few types available. I could just try it in a few rooms until we find one that works well for the whole house.

Hi all We have recently moved into our new house, but I would like to try to reduce our oil usage. We have a traditional system with an oil burner, radiators, a hot water cylinder in the hot press, and a header tank the in attic. In the hot press there is also something like an immersion heater in a very small tank that can heat water on demand but also heats the water in the cylinder (a willis heater). The problem is the heating controls are very basic, just one timeswitch on the wall in the utility room that turns the boiler on/off and a cylinder thermostat the operates a valve on the pipe to the hot water cylinder coil. There is no room thermostat anywhere. I was thinking of just changing the timeswitch in the utility for a time/temperature controller but unfortunately the utilitly room faces south and is one of the warmest rooms in the house. I'm wary that having the thermostat here would turn the heating off while the rest of the house is sill cold. Also with the current setup we have no way of heating the hot water for taps/showers without having the heating on too, other than using the immersion. Any ideas on what we can use? Is using the immersion heater when we need hot water without heating the best option for us?

If I understand this (I probably don't) then the thermal delay of insulation is based on the amount of heat the material can store, combined with the rate the heat is transmitted through it. I'm probably getting too technical for myself here, but does this affect the way u-values are calculated? For example if a material's heat transfer is measured when it is cold, for the initial time period some of the heat will be absorbed into the material and not transferred making the u-value appear lower than it would be if measured after heat has been applied for a few hours and the material cannot absorb any more at that temperature. Is this accounted for when testing? Am I completely misunderstanding this whole thing?