"chris French" wrote in message
...
There seems to be floating about among some people I know online the idea
that keeping the central heating on all the time is cheaper than turning
it off at night. Not sure where it comes from, but seeing as they all
frequent the same/ related e-mail lists, maybe from there.

The basic idea seems to be that it costs more to heat the house back up
in the morning, than to keep it at the same temp.

now I know it depends on things like internal and external temp (we have a
programmable stat set at 12-13 C, it hardly seems to turn on except when
down to about freezing outside from what I can tell),

But in principle it seems rubbish, it must use more energy to keep
something hot, than to let it cool and then reheat., but a couple of
people had been hard to convince, esp. as a 'plumber told me it)

I discovered that in my, very leaky, house if I had the heating off whilst I
was out all day (or asleep), when I wanted it back on in order to make the
room warm enough, quickly enough, I had to turn the boiler temperature up
and that this did use more gas.

So, in order to make the room warm enough when I got home (awake), using the
normal boiler temp, I set the heating to come hours before and it still
wasn't warm enough. I progressively made the "on" time earlier and earlier
until it ended up only being off for about 2 hours in the day and 4 at
night.

I gave up at that point and it's now on all day, costing me about half a
meter unit a day.

tim