Author Topic: I'm still holding out... (Read 30583 times)

barakta · « **Reply #100 on:** 18 October, 2013, 01:59:55 pm »

I wouldn't go back to non clever computer controlled heating, it has the win of running for a few mins if people go into occupied rooms of below $threshold-temperature and we can add more minutes of heat on demand by telling the IRC bot. more stable temperature is better than fluctuating I feel.

I CBA with avoiding heating if I am cold and already wearing some layers - I don't need to annoy my dodgy joints any more than necessary and cold leads to tension leads to serious amounts of sillypain. I am finding a £2 market pashmina around my neck helps reduce my reliance on difficult to get in/out of jumpers and heating tho. Think our heating is running for less than an hour a day and much of that seems to be "on instruction" from humans cos we've been ill this week.

Kim · « **Reply #101 on:** 18 October, 2013, 02:16:56 pm »

Quote from: Montmorency on 17 October, 2013, 09:37:41 pm

I've *never* heated a bedroom. Cannot understand why people insist on having radiators in them.

I can think of two good reasons, off the top of my head:

Some of us have respiratory problems that are affected by air temperature. You can be wrapped up snug and warm in a million TOG duvet, but you still have to breathe the air in the room, and if that's too cold over a prolonged period it can be a recipe for those nasty lingering chest infections that take forever to clear.

Secondly, and not entirely unrelated to the above, some of us have crappy old houses which suffer from damp and mould if not adequately heated. It doesn't take a lot of heating to keep this under control, but a radiator with a thermostatic valve turned down low is a low-effort, safe and efficient way to provide this.

spesh · « **Reply #102 on:** 06 November, 2013, 05:28:40 pm »

I've finally admitted defeat and switched on the central heating.

Montmorency · « **Reply #103 on:** 08 November, 2013, 03:31:38 pm »

I've just fired it up as well.

The cold of a couple days ago was OK but the wet and damp today has convinced me that a quick blast is acceptable. Temp in the sitting room was around 13 degrees - so at least a degree above my usual threshold for enriching (other) gas company shareholders.

Canardly · « **Reply #104 on:** 08 November, 2013, 03:55:47 pm »

Fascinating that European energy prices have fallen considerably, giving rise to concerns of deflation, whilst in the UK we have been told world prices have increased giving rise to circa 10% price increases. RIP off Britain is alive and well.

Montmorency · « **Reply #105 on:** 08 November, 2013, 04:07:47 pm »

Quote from: Canardly on 08 November, 2013, 03:55:47 pm

Fascinating that European energy prices have fallen considerably, giving rise to concerns of deflation, whilst in the UK we have been told world prices have increased giving rise to circa 10% price increases. RIP off Britain is alive and well.

Where do you find time-series for EU pricing? You can get the EU published current prices here http://www.energy.eu/ (which show UK to be pretty cheap, really) but they seem to want you to pay for historical data.

If their prices really are declining whereas ours are increasing it could either be because they're using less due to recession - or purely because they're using a hard currency whereas we've printed ourselves into big currency value loss over the past five years; so anything ('gas etc) is going to cost more in £ than it used to.

Canardly · « **Reply #106 on:** 08 November, 2013, 04:29:46 pm »

I did not phrase that properly....

Peston

'The first (which you may already have said to yourself) is that Europe's most powerful central banker - who is supposed to know a thing or two - says energy prices are on a pronounced downward trend.

Which is not quite the message we've been getting from Centrica's British Gas, Scottish & Southern, Scottish Power and Npower.'

woollypigs · « **Reply #107 on:** 12 November, 2013, 05:55:39 pm »

So we are sitting here in our fleece blanket wondering if it is time to put the heating on since we can see our breath

Domestique · « **Reply #108 on:** 12 November, 2013, 06:22:53 pm »

No central heating on yet, have the thermostat on 15c and its not come on yet. That said the wood burning stove is on and at the moment its a nice 20c in the front room

Basil · « **Reply #109 on:** 19 August, 2014, 09:24:14 pm »

It's august. I get home from the pub to find that la lodger has put the central heating on. $:-\$

Pancho · « **Reply #110 on:** 19 August, 2014, 09:30:24 pm »

Well, I ordered a woodburner today.

Mrs P is wrapped in a blanket and complaining of the chill. If her landlord were as liberal as your lodger's, she'd have the heating on too.

Butterfly · « **Reply #111 on:** 19 August, 2014, 09:46:44 pm »

I put the heating on at work for an hour today. It was cold and both I and my older charge had already put jumpers on and were still cold.

Kim · « **Reply #112 on:** 19 August, 2014, 09:56:16 pm »

I manually^[1] ran the heating for 8 minutes earlier^[2]. Partly because it was chilly, but also because experience has taught me that the middle of August is the best time to discover that your heating no longer works properly.

_{[1] Because telling an IRC bot to do something for you counts as 'manually' now...
[2] This is about the time it takes our system to get all the radiators up to heat.}

Vince · « **Reply #113 on:** 19 August, 2014, 10:08:12 pm »

You can chat with your heating system? How come? Is this something I should consider when I get the boiler replaced?

Pancho · « **Reply #114 on:** 19 August, 2014, 10:25:34 pm »

"Kim" is just the house algorithm. Trouble is, once it (now "she") became sentient, talking to rads and thermostats became to tedious for words so she signed up to yacf.

CrinklyLion · « **Reply #115 on:** 19 August, 2014, 10:33:01 pm »

I put the heating on the other day for, theoretically, 10 minutes in order to give some been-on-jollydays-and-got-washed laundry a head start on getting dry prior to being packed ready for the next holiday.

Woke up a bit toasty in the morning and realised I'd forgotten to turn it off...

Kim · « **Reply #116 on:** 19 August, 2014, 10:46:36 pm »

Quote from: Vince on 19 August, 2014, 10:08:12 pm

You can chat with your heating system? How come? Is this something I should consider when I get the boiler replaced?

Because if you're going to put a microcontroller in every room, you might as well give it something to do besides occasionally flashing some lights on and off^[1]. The poor things would get awfully bored, otherwise.

Being able to make everything nice and toasty from bed or a smartphone as you approach Mordor Central, all the better.

_{[1] Baraktas, for the non-auditory notification of things like doorbells, phones and fire alarms.}

Pedaldog. · « **Reply #117 on:** 19 August, 2014, 11:39:32 pm »

So they call them "Storage Heaters". Why can't I switch them on in the warm bits of summer and save the heat up for Winter? They just can't take it these days, modern heaters, young 'uns eh

Kim · « **Reply #118 on:** 19 August, 2014, 11:43:34 pm »

Because that goes against the core philosophy of storage heaters. If you wanted one that stored up heat in winter and released it in summer, you might have more luck...

Wowbagger · « **Reply #119 on:** 19 August, 2014, 11:46:37 pm »

I have been in shorts, short-sleeved shirt, sockless with sandals all day. We have not had the heat on. The maximum temperature outside was 19.8°C. That's the first time this month that the temperature has stayed below 20°C.

I have to say that I did feel a little chilly in the tent the night before last. It was a mistake not taking my blanket with me. That Vango down sleeping bag of mine, sold as 4 seasons, is scarcely even a 1 season bag. It was pricey too.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #120 on:** 20 August, 2014, 12:25:39 am »

One of my NA chums is from one of the Baltic States. He turned up at this evening's meeting wearing a full-on rugged-outdoorsy-stylee coat

Polar Bear · « **Reply #121 on:** 20 August, 2014, 12:36:40 am »

Paging Lal, er I mean Kim. Kim to the comms panel please ...

I like very much the idea that Mlle PB could turn on the heating using her smartphone on her journey home. She gets cold and likes to be warm. How easy are these things to buy and get installed please? I presume it becomes a network device and we'd have an app on the phone.

I'd really like an insight into this if you wouldn't mind, please?

Kim · « **Reply #122 on:** 20 August, 2014, 12:50:18 am »

Quote from: Polar Bear on 20 August, 2014, 12:36:40 am

Paging Lal, er I mean Kim. Kim to the comms panel please ...

I like very much the idea that Mlle PB could turn on the heating using her smartphone on her journey home. She gets cold and likes to be warm. How easy are these things to buy and get installed please? I presume it becomes a network device and we'd have an app on the phone.

I'd really like an insight into this if you wouldn't mind, please?

Dunno. I know that various commercial "smart thermostat" products exist, and that Google seem to be into this sort of thing in their usual useful-but-slightly-sinister way, but that's about the extent of my knowledge on the subject. I rolled my own^[1], and if you were inclined to do likewise, you probably wouldn't need me to tell you how to do it - switching a relay not being rocket science.

Installation shouldn't be too complicated though - whatever it is, it's going to be a drop-in replacement for a traditional timer/thermostat, which is just a switch or two as far as the boiler is concerned.

_{[1] As a subfeature of a system designed primarily to achieve something else - if I were designing a pure heating control system I wouldn't want to do it that way.}

thing1 · « **Reply #123 on:** 20 August, 2014, 06:06:53 am »

Quote from: Polar Bear on 20 August, 2014, 12:36:40 am

Paging Lal, er I mean Kim. Kim to the comms panel please ...

I like very much the idea that Mlle PB could turn on the heating using her smartphone on her journey home. She gets cold and likes to be warm. How easy are these things to buy and get installed please? I presume it becomes a network device and we'd have an app on the phone.

I'd really like an insight into this if you wouldn't mind, please?

Nest (now part of Google) is the popular one https://store.nest.com/uk/product/thermostat/ As well as being remote controllable by mobile, the big selling point of that is it "learns" your routine to make its own optimizations without the need for lots of programming. B&Q etc sell them.
Also there's things like http://www.diy.com/nav/fix/plumbing-central-heating/central-heating-controls/thermostats/Homexpert-Evohome-Wireless-Heating-Control-13798571?skuId=14269276 with lots of (virtual) knobs and dials but less of the learning stuff.

Kim · « **Reply #124 on:** 20 August, 2014, 12:40:33 pm »

Occupancy detection (which the Nest appears to do) is something of a black art, but goes an awfully long way towards effective heating control. No point heating an empty house, of course, and you typically need a lot less heat when you're upstairs than when you're downstairs (ideally heating systems would have these as separate zones). Also, doing something sensible when you're in bed^[1]...

_{[1] This reminds me, I still need to write the code to incorporate the alarm clock status with the heating decision logic - the old system didn't know about that...}