Getting an indoor thermostat for central heating.

[Glittertwins]

Hi,
Our gas central heating is not controlled by a single indoor thermostat but by individual radiator controls in each room.
Last winter, both DH and I felt the house was never actually warm and couldn't seem to get the heating right.
Is it better to have individual rad controls or would it be better to have a single thermostat so that we could set it to 20C for example? If so, how do I go about getting one put in - do I need an electrician or a gas certified person?

you should have both a room stat and trvs.

Omitting the room stat was probably done by somone wanting to save a few pounds on the installation, or sometimes if it was fittted for a very old person who likes to switch their heating on and off all the time depending on the weather.

the room stat should be in the room you use most, provided it has not got another source of heat such as an open fire or big sunny windows, which will throw the heating adjustment out.

the room with the stat should have no TRV, or, the TRV should have its head removed and the decorators head fitted, or at least should be set to fully open and welded shut so no-one ever fiddles with it.

The lockshield in the room with the wall stat should be tightened down so that it heats up slower than all the other rooms in the house. Otherwise the stat will turn the heating off when the rest of the house is cold. You ought to balance the system by adjusting all the lockshields (even when you have TRVs) so the rooms heat up at similar speeds. If you have rooms that are cold even when the radiator is hot, the the radiator is too small for the room. This is often done by builders to save a few pounds. Unless your boiler is very old or your house is very large it is unlikely the boiler is underpowered. Improving insulation, especially cavity wall and loft, and draughtproofing may reduce heat loss enough for small radiators to cope, and will also reduce bills..

An electrician can fit a room stat, but a heating enginer should have a hundred times more experience. It is not a gas part so does not require Gas Safe certification. I would go for a Programmabkle Stat where you set different temperatures for different imes of day and days of the week. The less reason you have for fiddling with the settings the simpler and more economical it will be. Avoid wireless stats as they have two more potential causes of failure.

ACL Drayton and Honeywell are good brands. The Honeywell CM907 is well thought of. Never buy, or allow anyone to install, a control with has the letters "SI" in its name. This means it is designed to stop the heating working properly at Service Intervals about once a year to force you to call in a serviceman. They are usually fitted by landlords in rented properties.

The addition of a room stat will not make your house warmer (piglet will correct me if I am wrong).
I think you should get a gas engineer to take a look and it could be something really simple so if you are due for a boiler service soon get the engineer to look at this then and it might cost you nothing.

I am thinking that it may be the temperature is turned down on the boiler - perhaps by the people who lived there previous? This is really simple to change.

But it could be problem with your rads - perhaps they are too small.

BTW your boiler should be checked/ serviced every year and if yours hasn't been done for more tha a year then Aug sept is ideal time - often cheaper offers to do this in summer whereas gas engineers are busy in winter.

true, the room stat won't make it warmer; but in the absence of one, some kind of manual fiddling will have been used to try to cut down the uncontrolled waste of energy, perhaps, as you say, at the boiler stat or maybe at the rad valves. A good stat and timer will improve efficiency and comfort, so is a good thing to start with. It will enable the OP to start warming up the house to the required temperature an hour or so before getting up or coming home, without the extra problem of overheating it or wasting energy.

BTW, Glitter, when a radiator is being heated, the inlet pipe should be "too hot to hold" and the outlet pipe should be "too hot to hold for long." You can measure it more accurately with pipe thermometers. If it is, and the room is still cold, the rad is too small.

Thanks all, the boiler is new because it was done when we had the loft conversion done however we inherited the rest of it. PigletJohn has hit the nail on the head with saving money on installation - the previous owners were very tight-fisted looking at how things had been done around the the house generally.
We had the boiler temperature at a reasonable level but found it hard to get a decent temperature throughout the house - we seem to have been messing about with the rad controls every evening! It would be nice to know that the temperature is being set at a constant without this.
So, next question, how to find a reputable heating engineer?

My rental has no thermostat inside house and the boiler is outside in a hut. It's a nightmare. Always feels too hot or cold. Constantly fiddling with radiator controls.

ask around friends and neighbours to get recommendations. Also, when driving around locally, look out for tradesmens vans parked outside houses. Ask for a card. Write the address on the back. A few weeks later, visit the housholder and ask for their opinion. They are very likely to tell you if they are (a) delighted (b) fed up.

Never believe what you read on websites called things like "Really Good Trade Finder dot com" as they are usually paid by the tradesmen and the reviews might or might not have been written by him and his mates. In which case they are advertisements masquarading as recommendations.

You will not find certain websites named on here because their solicitors harass forums that say anything unfavourable.

Always look for a firm with a local address and landline telephone number. Never call anyone with an 08** number because it will not be a local firm. It will usually be an commission agency that passes out calls to any tradesman who is willing to pay them because he has no customer base or local reputation.

Good tradesmen don't need to advertise much, and certainly don't need to pay to get a listing on a website.

Reputable traders have their name, address, phone no and trade affiliation on their van, to attract business. What sort of person drives an unmarked white van?

For electricians/gas engineers, they must be members of a Competent Persons Scheme/Gas safe Registered so ask them to tell you the name of their scheme and how long they have been members. You can check electricians on their scheme website, and gas engineers AFAIK on Gas Safe. Gas Engineers must carry their personal ID with their photo on it. Look at it, carefully before you give him any work. If he has "forgotten it" or "left it in the van," cheerfully tell him you don't mind waiting while he gets it. If he is genuinly qualified, he will be pleased that you are checking. If he acts insulted and gets aggressive, he is probably not qualified and hoping to bully you. Think of it like getting into an unmarked minicab late at night and not seeing a licence on the dashboard. If you don't mind being chopped up and dumped, or if you don't mind a cowboy gas job, you needn't check.

All excellent adviced from Piglet. He said it but I would stress a local firm /sole trader - who works locally can be a big advantage - if they need to "pop" in or "pop" back or come out of normal hours it is easy for them to do that.
You are likely to get a much better and cheaper service from someone who isn't travelling too far.
We think of about 5 miles as being really local even though we do work much further.

Thanks...after all that, I forgot about the local guy who did our first boiler. I will get DH to call him later (not a cop out from me, he happens to be almost deaf and can hear lower male tones better down the phone than female). I remember posts before about certain websites who aren't quite as they seem so thanks again.

Is it OK to resurrect this thread? Or should I start a new one? Our house (we are in UK) doesn't have a thermostat (...ducks!). We have no thermostats on radiators either, not a sausage. Expect I sound like a bit of an idiot but this is all a bit novel for me.

The boiler is a combi about nine years old, regularly serviced. Last two winters I controlled heating by the control clock on the boiler & this allowed me to say when it was on and off, and the temp of the water (scale of 0-10). I tended to keep heat on a lot of the time but on a low setting (= water temp) so the house didn't get really cold and have to heat up. We have a barometer so I knew what the temp was in that room (the one we use most) and adjusted if the temp/forecast was for colder/warmer - a bit of a pain but manageable as I work from home (& the barometer means I can also have a go at forecasting weather myself, great fun, but back to the point...).

A room thermostat would be more efficient/cheaper, yes? (... dumb question, ducks again). I looked at the Honeywell suggested. Add on rad thermostats and we have a big bill, but gas heating isn't cheap anyway.

Assuming we WOULD be sensible to get a room thermostat, I saw above that PigletJohn said to avoid wireless thermostats. I understand the reason, but with nothing wired in at all at the moment, would the wiring in be expensive enough to make the risk of the wireless bit going wrong worth taking, if you get my drift? Would wiring be complicated/expensive as the boiler is two rooms and a lot of brick walls from the room the thermostat would sensibly be in; it's a minor point but we don't want to have to (re-)decorate. It would have been sensible to sort this first, but ignorance was bliss at the time.

Also, it's likely that the boiler will be replaced in the next say 5 years, may be sooner (groans) and how easy is it to re-connect a thermostat? Sorry, loads of questions, hope that's OK

Yes, a room stat will improve economy and/or comfort, depending on how you set it, and a programmable stat is better than a dial one.
It just needs a cable run from the boiler to the position where you want the stat. preferably in your main living room as long as it does not have another source of heat such as a wood stove. If the boiler backs onto a wall to the living room, the cable can be put through a hole drilled in the wall.

It would be an advantage to fit TRVs to all the radiators but this is labour intensive so expensive unless you can do DIY plumbing. If you ever have a new rad fitted, or change a leaky valve, or get a new boiler, get TRVs done at the same time. Some of the labour and time is in draining down and refilling.

The cable can sometimes be run under the floor or in a ceiling, at the worst, in 18mm mini-trunking on the wall (possibly on top of the skirting). it carries mains voltage. Once you have one, it is very easy to connect it to a new boiler; or, indeed, to change the stat for a different one.

Mini-trunking is white PVC with a removable cover, and can be painted.

In some cases, if you have an airing cupboard with the cylinder, pump and 3-way valve in it, the room stat cable can be connected there.

p.s.

if you are fretting about the cable run, it would be better than nothing to have a £6 stat on the kitchen wall, but as far from the cooker and boiler as you can manage. But if you are paying someone to fit it, might as well do a proper job. You will keep fiddling with a dial stat. Programmable stats are set and forget for years on end.

p.p.s

maybe I'm just barmy. Some people like wireless stats. They don't all go wrong.

We had a Honeywell wireless one with no problems for many years in our old house and we are having it fitted again here when we have new boiler/cylinder etc next month.
I understand it's got more chances of going wrong but in both houses (large Edwardian & now large Victorian) cable runs can be a huge pain in the bum. Our plumber says he's fitted this one a lot and would have recommended it if we hadn't requested it.

That's brilliant Piglet John, thanks very much, reassuring and really useful

Wonkylegs, that's the kind of house we are in

We've been recommended a local heating engineer so no excuses for not getting on and doing something about it now!

We just had a Honeywell wireless one fitted so pleased to see a thumbs up from PigletJohn! One question though, the guy who fitted it said to put the remote bit in the hallway as that's the coldest part of the house (leaky door, that's another story) so he removed the TRV from that radiator. Doesn't this mean, though, that the heating will come on far more often than we need in other rooms? The bedrooms and living room are much warmer anyway. He also advised to have the individual TRVs set to maximum, and that "if a child touches a hot radiator they'll soon learn not to do it again". I was a bit concerned about that! Is that what you meant, PigletJohn, by 'too hot to hold'?

Should we move the remote thermostat part to the living room where we are for about 80% of our waking hours, and to heck with the cold hallway? Also, is his advice about super-hot radiators safe? He said to have the heating temp on the combi boiler up high, so it heats the water very hot, sends it round the radiators, then switches off again quite fast. Is this better than having it heat the water to a lower temp more often? We're in a reasonably well insulated semi, the only area that's cold really is the hall as it has a single glazed window and aforementioned leaky door (which will be replaced before long!).

Back in the 1950's people used to put thermostats (and telephones) in the hall.

It is not the best place.

Better to have it in the living room you use most, provided it does not have another source of heat, such as a woodburner or big cooker.

If the hall has greatest heat loss, you can address it by balancing the radiators so that the hall radiator gives out more heat than the others. It may be that the radiator is undersized. You should fix the draught.

Setting TRVs to max is completely wrong. Their purpose is to be adjusted to warm the room to your preferred temperature.

It is correct that the room with the wall stat should not have a TRV; or the TRV thermostatic head should re removed and a Decoratyors Cap screrwed on (these are supplied free with TRVs to avoid damage or paint splashes to the expensive thermostatic part, which is removable), or at the very least that one (only) should be set to max.

Modern condensing boilers run at theit most efficient when they are set to about 60C.

All boilers are more efficient when they tick along, rather than going on and off for short periods.

Email your boiler manufacturer and see what they say.

Thanks very much! We can certainly adjust the rad in the living room. Should we try and get a TRV back on the one in the hallway, or not worry too much about that? The hallway one is just a single (as it's quite a narrow space, I guess) and isn't particularly big, and has to heat the whole downstairs hall and the heat rises straight up the stairs. Might ponder replacing that with a better one then.

NB you're quite right about the phone, that's also in the hallway...!

PigletJohn, could you elaborate more on when it's appropriate to have the room stat cable connected in the airing cupboard? That would be ideal for us as it's the temperature in the bedrooms that I would be most concerned about and the airing cupboard is between two of them, plus our boiler is about 20 feet from the house so running a cable could be messy.

JumpJockey, could you put a curtain across the door? We put one across our hall door a few years ago and it made a huge difference. Then last week we put a thermal lining on the existing curtain and the temperature in DS's room (above the hall door) has gone up by 2 degrees.

We're planning on getting a new door anyway, as a) we want a part glazed one, the hallway is quite dark, and b) it's in very bad nick despite being only about 5 years old, when there's very heavy rain the water soaks in where the wood isn't properly sealed and then leaks down onto the mat below. The coldness is a side issue compared to those two!

Sorry for a slight thread hi-jack, but where would you put a thermostat if you have 2 main rooms downstairs, one of which has a wood burner and the other an aga?

The plan is to use these independant heat sources rather than the central heating as much as poss, but we will need top ups in the bedrooms at bedtime and in the morning if I can hide the fact that the heating is on from DH.

Catlady

Sometimes, the airing cupboard contains the pump, the 3-port valve, the cylinder stat, and all their wires are connected in a grey or cream plastic junction box ("wiring centre"). It is likely that a room stat can be wired in to the same junction box, to control the 3-port valve which then controls the boiler. It is equally possibly that the pump and 3-port valve will be next to the boiler, though, or in some more modern boilers, inside it. it would be best to ask around for a well-recommended heating engineer with some experience, who will be able to look at how it is connected already.

Often the boiler is directly underneath the airing cupboard, so cables are led through the ceiling between the two, which again is fairly easy to rearrange.

santa

you will have to put it in a room which has a radiator but no stove, and is always kept heated.

A landing is better than a hall, but not as good as a living room

p.s.

you might also have it zoned, with a separate thermostats and valves upstairs and down. This costs more to install but is appropriate for a larger home or one with complex heating arrangements.

You will need TRVs in the rooms with the stoves so that the radiators don't try to heat the room even more.

We have a honeywell wireless for the first time in this house and it is brilliant. In the summer I put it in the warmest room deliberatly so the heating doesn't come on on a cool day. In winter it sits in the coldest room so it stays on longer and doesnt switch into standby. Love it.