Heating overnight

[Frotheecoffee]

Live in a flat and it's extremely cold overnight. Currently the hall is 14 degrees. Extremely cold throughout. DC is in my bed tonight. The thermostat on 15, and it will go all night I suspect. WIBU to leave it on all night or would that be terribly wasteful?

18 is the temp mine’s on when it’s on to warm rooms for sitting in! I wear an oodie though, and have a blanket over my feet. Plus the thermostat is where I sit, so one in a hall would be different.
I set mine to only come on at night if it drops below 12 and it never actually does. I have a thick duvet and the heating comes on half an hour before o get up to take the chill off. As a PP suggested, an electric powered radiator in the bedroom with a timer could solve your problem, OP.

Pretty sure research has shown this isn’t the case.

Whatever research has shown I've tried out both methods in my home and in our case it costs very little more to have moderate heating overnight as opposed to taking hours to get back up to 19°.

I never have the heating on overnight, can't stand to be hot in bed. Our thermostat goes down to 14.

Just set your heating to come on a bit earlier in the morning so it doesn't feel too cold when you get up/get the kids ready.

There's no need for heating to be on all night, unless it's absolutely freezing outside (I set mine so it never drops below 10 degrees - which in my home does only happen when it's below freezing outside).

Unpopular opinion: heating the flat for the 2 weeks of cold spell won't bankrupt you. Letting the flat freeze and get damp and potentially lead to chronic infections or asthma (because of mould) in your DC - absolutely might throw off your finance.

I switched ours on all night last night when DD woke up cold at 4am.

Finding the house takes so long to get up to temperature in the morning by if it's off overnight.

Will revert to normal when the cold snap is over, but for now if you can afford it just do what you have to do.

My heating will come on if it drops below 14 indoors at night. What that means in practice is that it is never normally on at night, but probably will over the next few nights when it's going to be well into the minuses.
Just means it doesn't run as long in the morning when the thermostat is at 18.5 for the day.

Never on overnight unless it drops below 5c inside then it would kick in
Goes off at 9pm and comes on at 6.45 so 30 mins before I get up

Thanks for all the responses.

We turned the heating down to 11 last night. Woke up half an hour before DC and then cranked up the heating. It was very cold, but not lower than 11 to trigger the heating to come on.

Off to look up a replacement and programmable thermostat.

Any advice on individual room thermostats?

@Frotheecoffee - we have Tado. It’s very good as you can just use radiator and not main units so easy to add gradually and it works with various heating or heat pumps/ pellets/ oil as well as gas.

In your case you could just buy a starter kit, as that includes starter unit and one radiator thermostat . Put that straight on your bedroom radiator and you can then have bedroom at say 16 overnight, 20 6am- 8.30am, 17 daytime if not in room
much, 7-9pm 20 again before bed etc

https://www.tado.com/gb-en/smart-radiator-thermostat-overview

Then after than you just buy the individual thermostats to add to other rooms. But I would recommend waiting until Black Friday or other offers as they drop to about 1/2 price then

I hate being cold too (and feel it), but 14 at night under a duvet isn’t cold. I’m perfectly warm. I have it at 18 or higher when I’m sitting around in the evening though.

We have Hive which is brilliant. Very easy to use. I just set it up for 5.00-6.00 so when you wake up it's nice and worm.

You’re agreeing then. I was responding to someone who was suggesting it would be cheaper. Whether it’s worth doing is another matter and will depend on lots of factors.

Check your house insurance. All the competitive snowpeople on this thread who would never ever have the heating on at night might find there is a minimum temperature required to ensure coverage against frozen pipes and follow on damage. (15C is typical)

Its also worth considering that depending on your building and boiler it can be cheaper to have it on 24*7 but set to about 15ish overnight than to have the home drop to 10-12 or less overnight and then have to ramp it up in the morning.

There is a correlation between constant low temps (12-13) and poor health outcomes with age or other conditions being aggravating factors. Again this may not be an issue for you but will be for some on this thread.

One last point on smart home devices - be very picky if you have an electricity supply which has glitches (most rural areas and some urban). I've found Hives to be distressingly sensitive to blips in supply and had to put DM's onto a UPS (but that doesn't help if the exchange is affected or the power outage is very long). They don't reliably reconnect well after the event which is a nightmare if away from home.
No idea if Nests/Tados are more resilient but I went for a "small company" heating control system which is rock solid reliable and connects into my Apple Homekit - it was cheaper too.

We usually have our thermostat on 15 during the day - That’s perfectly fine. Never at night. It’s far better to warm the bed and the person - electric blanket, hot bottle etc.

@C8H10N4O2 I've found my Nest to be quite robust for that. I don't live rurally but we've had recent issues with the power going off repeatedly for a few hours at a time, and the Nest has in every case happily reconnected itself back to the wifi as soon as that came back on.

And I agree with you completely about letting the temperature drop too low. Why would it be any more cost efficient to have to heat the house from a much lower start point in the morning when a few boosts overnight could prevent that plus make the start of the day more comfortable?

We bought Tado and sent it back. We found it very annoying in that if you set it to say 20 degrees, then once it’s 20 degrees by the radiator, it will go off. Except obviously the area by the radiator will be hotter than the rest of the room which meant it wasn’t heating the room up properly.

We just use a Nest now and control it via our phones.

Often the hall is cooler than other rooms, especially if you keep doors shut. It is reasonable to have thermostat in a cool hall at a lower temp (ours is at 15), but the rooms are warmer. Our heating is off 9pm-6am, with bedroom doors shut and 13tog duvets.

@SuperDopper - you can adjust Tado offset adjustments via app. If you have a large room with a radiator then you adjust to - 1 or 2 degrees even if you want the other end to be warmer. So when you set to 20 degrees for ‘living room’ it will carry on warming radiator longer as it measures first at 19 (if you set to room temp 20 and -1 offset).
If you have smaller rooms, or multiple radiators in smaller space you either don’t need to adjust or can adjust the other way to + temp.

If you have central smart unit, you get the Same problem as now as it will just heat temp to where the central box is

I still don’t find it that effective tbh. We kept the starter kit as we had already opened and used it, and it’s on a radiator in a large room, and quite often I find I have to set it on to 26-27 degrees for it to even warm up, when the Nest is set to 20 and heats up the rest of the house no bother.

Every time we get competitive under-heating!

I'm wearing a thermal base layer, 2 cashmere jumpers, thermal leggings and 2 pairs of socks plus slippers. I've just eaten a hot meal and I'm 38 weeks pregnant. It's 17.5 degrees in here and I'm not a comfortable temperature. I'm working so necessarily reasonably sedentary.
It's 17.5 degrees in here and I'm not a comfortable temperature.

Totally different in the day though. At 18 in the day sitting at my desk I'd need 2 jumpers, slippers and a blanket over my legs.

At night under the duvet I'm uncomfortably hot unless the room drops to about 14.

I left mine in for two nights last week as is was taking too long to heat the house in the morning to a pleasant temperature.

@SuperDopper - go on app and change your living room offset to -2.