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Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

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Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#81

Post by sokoloff »

sz4kerto wrote: post #58

We've moved to an new apartment (house) and we had to do a full renovation. It doesn't have modern insulation and I calculated that for the time being the ROI on insulation isn't worth it. It's a multi-floor semi-detached house and I wanted the best comfort and the most economical heating possible. In particular: stable and individually adjustable temperatures for bedrooms and living rooms; underfloor heating in some…

For every John Siegenthaler and Dan Holohan, there are thousands of mechanical engineers and tens of thousands of plumbers who are happier to slap in a $20K 4-hour boiler retrofit. There’s not enough extra money in catering to the 0.1% of homeowners who care about the details.

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#82

Post by adrianN »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #46
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still of the opinion that a dial works best. Especially in modern homes (in Europe at least), there seems to be a school of thought that you should just leave your thermostat at the same temperature at all times - the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature. Anyway, my ideal setup would be to install 'smart' thermostat taps on every radiator…

> the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature This is only true if the heating happens quickly and the system is less efficient when heating quickly. Otherwise, this doesn't make sense from a physics standpoint. A temporarily lower temperature differential means less kWh of heat lost.

Heating systems generally are more efficient when they need to output less power. Whether that cancels the increased heat loss seems to be a question that can’t be answered in general.

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#83

Post by amne »

sz4kerto wrote: post #58

We've moved to an new apartment (house) and we had to do a full renovation. It doesn't have modern insulation and I calculated that for the time being the ROI on insulation isn't worth it. It's a multi-floor semi-detached house and I wanted the best comfort and the most economical heating possible. In particular: stable and individually adjustable temperatures for bedrooms and living rooms; underfloor heating in some…

a bit off-topic: Are you running a single boiler and if so, how are you mixing UFH with radiators given there's a ~20C difference between the recommended temps for the two?

My knowledge is that for UFH you run at temps between 40-50C and radiators run at 60-70*C.

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#84

Post by HPsquared »

DamonHD wrote: post #75
Retric wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an artifact of how heating is setup inside your home. Which is more efficient depends on where you’re dumping heat inside the home, levels of insulation, etc. Energy moves from hot to cold linearly with temperature differences. Hypothetically, if the pipe was the same temperatures as the inside of your home all the heat transferred would be outside the envelope. The hotter the pipe the better this ratio become…

I moved all my radiators away from under windows (and upgraded the windows to triple glazing) to avoid maximising the temperature differential and energy loss through the wall under the windows, while eliminating the cool drafts that the under-window radiator placement was intended to counter.

What do you do for ventilation?

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#85

Post by sz4kerto »

rightbyte wrote: post #70
sz4kerto wrote: post #58

We've moved to an new apartment (house) and we had to do a full renovation. It doesn't have modern insulation and I calculated that for the time being the ROI on insulation isn't worth it. It's a multi-floor semi-detached house and I wanted the best comfort and the most economical heating possible. In particular: stable and individually adjustable temperatures for bedrooms and living rooms; underfloor heating in some…

Sounds like a nightmare for a future buyer to operate. Some people are unlucky enough to buy homes where a machine engineer designed the boiler setup and the boiler room have enough valves and manometers to like operate the engine of Titanic. I guess programmers are the new sinners in this area nowadays.

If we ever sell this (which we don't plan to), I know what to install (it'll be quite good, just not this perfect). I have it in a cupboard (a Siemens Connected Home thermostat system), the downside of that is that the combined UFH+radiator rooms will be less comfortable.

(But still more comfortable than 99% of the houses I've been in.)

I haven't mentioned in the parent comment but as a test I've dismantled the HA system and installed the Siemens system and it works well, just not 'perfectly'.

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#86

Post by sudahtigabulan »

DamonHD wrote: post #75
Retric wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an artifact of how heating is setup inside your home. Which is more efficient depends on where you’re dumping heat inside the home, levels of insulation, etc. Energy moves from hot to cold linearly with temperature differences. Hypothetically, if the pipe was the same temperatures as the inside of your home all the heat transferred would be outside the envelope. The hotter the pipe the better this ratio become…

I moved all my radiators away from under windows (and upgraded the windows to triple glazing) to avoid maximising the temperature differential and energy loss through the wall under the windows, while eliminating the cool drafts that the under-window radiator placement was intended to counter.

Do you mean you moved them to another wall, or just increased the gap?

(not a native speaker here)

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#87

Post by sz4kerto »

amne wrote: post #83
sz4kerto wrote: post #58

We've moved to an new apartment (house) and we had to do a full renovation. It doesn't have modern insulation and I calculated that for the time being the ROI on insulation isn't worth it. It's a multi-floor semi-detached house and I wanted the best comfort and the most economical heating possible. In particular: stable and individually adjustable temperatures for bedrooms and living rooms; underfloor heating in some…

a bit off-topic: Are you running a single boiler and if so, how are you mixing UFH with radiators given there's a ~20 C difference between the recommended temps for the two? My knowledge is that for UFH you run at temps between 40-50 C and radiators run at 60-70*C.

UFH has mixing valves, so it runs on 38 C and radiators run on 55C. Single boiler.

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#88

Post by uptown »

xattt wrote: post #36
smelendez wrote: post #11

I wonder what the ideal one-size fits all thermostat looks like. The one in my apartment has a “feature” a lot of US thermostats now have, where you set four ordered times called wake, leave, return, and sleep and the temperature you want the space in each interval. I know very few people who actually live in a household where everyone wakes, leaves, returns, and sleeps on the same schedule every day. I work from hom…

My wife and I worked a six-week shift work schedule for a long time. We got second-gen nest thermostats when they first came out (2012) thinking they were neat. Nope! The smart learning feature was the biggest pain in the ass. You’d be sleeping during the day for a night shift, only to find yourself freezing because it decided no one was home.

You can turn off the feature that changes temp based on presence. Or disable dynamic scheduling altogether.

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#89

Post by eloisant »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #38
smelendez wrote: post #11

I wonder what the ideal one-size fits all thermostat looks like. The one in my apartment has a “feature” a lot of US thermostats now have, where you set four ordered times called wake, leave, return, and sleep and the temperature you want the space in each interval. I know very few people who actually live in a household where everyone wakes, leaves, returns, and sleeps on the same schedule every day. I work from hom…

I'm still of the opinion that a dial works best. Especially in modern homes (in Europe at least), there seems to be a school of thought that you should just leave your thermostat at the same temperature at all times - the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature. Anyway, my ideal setup would be to install 'smart' thermostat taps on every radiator…

> the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature.

That's true if you completely stop heating. However if you lower the temperature by roughly 3.5C when you're not home, you'll be saving energy.

So you can for example program it to be 16C when you're out and 19C when you're in. You don't completely turn off heating indeed.

Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

#90

Post by gcanyon »

It's an awesome hack!

It seems like the easier hack would be to put a peltier heater/cooler under the thermostat then control that remotely to assume control over what temperature the thermostat sees.

The link to the exact model of thermostat isn't working, so I don't know how amenable its design is to this approach, but the thermostats I've used are generally wall-mounted and putting a heat/cool source under them wouldn't be too hard. You'd need to make sure that you didn't send both the heat and cool into the thermostat, but that's a simple positioning problem.

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