Heating...

[molemot]

I think people in the U.K. today are a bunch of pansies. When I think of my childhood way back in the 40's, we relied on a coal fire in the lounge and freezing our butts off everywhere else. It was so cold that we used to scratch drawings in the frost on the inside of the bedroom windows. If we wanted to get warm in bed, we got a hot water bottle. I can also remember trekking to junior school in freezing conditions in short trousers with blue knees. We were made of stronger stuff in those days.

Bloody luxury, lad....! I used to trek three miles to secondary school, still in short trousers...nowadays the little dears have a dedicated bus service. Both my brother and I shared the experience of watching our father drive past us with a cheery wave as we struggled through our daily walk home....in the rain.... at least he waved! Mornings were characterised by mother attempting to light the fire...our only source of heating and hot water... holding sheets of newspaper against the fireplace to try to make the fire "draw". I lost count of how many condemned telegraph poles I chopped up for burning...being saturated in creosote they burned well. Bedroom windows were, as you say, iced up solid in the winter. The waste pipe from the bathroom washbasin used to freeze, too....hanging a hot water bottle on that helped. Hot water for washing meant boiling a kettle or a saucepan on the stove. The house was so draughty that we would huddle around the fire like stone age man...front toasting, rear freezing. At least it meant that the RAF survival courses didn't hurt....

After that sort of upbringing, running an Empire would have been no sweat; thinking about it, I suppose that is what we were all intended to do..... It has left me with a horror of open fires and chilly misery, and I will NOT go down that route again...(turns on heatpump!)

[pete]

http://www.phespirit.info/montypython/four_yorkshiremen.htm

[Iconic Ride]

I remember that skit...

[MPx]

It's a dynamic way to heat your house, you decide what's heated, if your in the house you just overide the settings to what you want or allow it to decide.

The simplest way to save money is to 2 zone your house, upstairs and downstairs. How often do you use your bedroom once you've got up in the morning?

Also, you set a min temp for all the rooms, an OFF room in my house is 17 degC, an ON room is 21 degC.

You should never let your house go fully cold in the winter, the start up to warm uses masses of energy.

I save £450 a year using this system, 8 zones.

Fair enough, we live differently. Just for the record...I do find I'm in and out of our bedroom (and en-suite ) at various points in the day. One of the other bedrooms doubles as Fran's study and she's in there on her computer or at her desk usually for an hour or two a day. The third bedroom also acts as a drying room/airer. So as I said, we use the whole house (except the dining room) at various times every day. I'm sure we could restrict ourselves to just the downstairs rooms during the day if we wanted to and I suspect with some clever controls we could save some heating by doing so. But my point was really different to this. I see this thread as really about flexibility and comfort vs cost and I guess we will all draw our lines in different places on that.

[Iconic Ride]

Just to keep things in perspective, it's of some note that we've only had the ability to make these [temperature] selection decisions and engage in debate about the options available during fairly recent "modern times." Whenever I found myself touring various historical castles throughout England or elsewhere in Europe, I was always struck by the primitive "technologies" employed for weak attempts at maintaining any semblance of comfortable temperatures---basically strategically placed fireplaces to huddle 'round. And, of course, lots of blankets one imagines. Cold stone floors and walls, drafty windows, and large open spaces must have made for less than ideal conditions for trips to the pantry for one's midnight snack. And here we are, centuries later, quibbling about the nuances of thermostatic control of our personal environment, using devices (and energy sources) that could not have been dreamt of by those who preceded us, all the while carrying on our hair-splitting disputations with fellows halfway around the planet...in real time no less. Will our own descendants, in like manner, look back upon our technologies as being equally rudimentary?

[B1 RMA]

What I would pay good money for would be a thermostatic valve that I could set to say 3-4 but it could be turned up to max for say 30 minutes then go back to 3-4 but still display max when checked. This would solve my heating problems in every respect, as I mentioned in my first post I bought a smaller house and specified windows with big air gaps insulated everything properly and run the heating 24 hours a day in the winter. This all falls to bits when the other two members of my household feel cold even when I have achieved 20 C in all rooms and 21-22 in the lounge. So the valves I would love to own would give that extra boost and when checked the radiator would feel hotter when touched by the other members of the house (thats an important bit the feeling its working but for only a short period) then it would set itself back to 3-4, sheer bliss I think I may put some thought into designing one.

[slewthy]

I think Roger is right.

Heat one room - the biggest or main living area. Keeps the family together, the combined heat of which means you have to heat the room even less!

The other rooms, well the bedrooms get some heat at bedtimes but otherwise, its lots of layers /big jumpers - very cheap.

When people come into out house - an old, large farmhouse, they always comment on how warm it is. Little do they know that just through the next door is a thermocline so steep, you'd need a 4WD to go down it.

Yes, my wife moans about it, but that also generates some heat too.

Although it is more than balanced by the frosty looks....

[oneshot]

I monitor my house:

Updated in real time.

[slewthy]

Presumably, the area between those 2 sets of lines is the energy required to heat the house?