NT wrote:
On Oct 22, 1:55 pm, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:
NT wrote:
On Oct 21, 8:39 pm, Dave wrote:
In article ,
says...
In article ,
Dave wrote:
What's the best way (and by that I think I mean the cheapest way) of
heating just one room? We have a box room that I'm going to set up as an
office as I'm now going to be working from home. I assume that the way
NOT to do it is have the full house central heating on and turn down (or
off?) the TRVs in all the other rooms?
It's a 1960s semi-detached dormer (chalet) bungalow with one external
wall being "normal" brick/cavity/brick, the other external wall has the
window and has (I think) inner plasterboard/wood frame/outer tile
construction and the other two walls are standard stud walls.
In case anyone was going to suggest one of those stand-alone gas
heaters, I assume it would have to go on the brick wall but due to the
room layout, that wall is the best choice for the desk and shelving so
I'm afraid that's a non-starter.
Assuming you heat the house morning and evening as with normal occupation
but out at work all day, a small electric fan heater on a thermostat
should have no trouble keeping it topped up. Or a similar oil filled rad
if you don't like the noise of a fan heater.
Thanks everyone - an oil-filled rad with thermostat I think it is then!
:-)
Thats nearly the worst of all options. Not only are plugin electrics
the most expensive to run, but the low power output and lack of fan
mean it'll need to be switched on a while before the room's used,
wasting even more money.
Rubbish.
The BIG costs are heating HUGE spaces that is unavoidable unless you are
zoned to the hilt and even then running a whole house boiler to heat
just one room is crappily inefficient.

Its FAR cheaper to heat a smaller space with expensive electricity than
to try and modulate a whole house boiler down to do it and zone it
accordingly..

NT

How precisely is it more costly to heat one room with CH, with the
other rooms TRVs set to off? Where are you proposing a large amount of
heat is being lost?

TRV set to off still means hot water going round pipes. Plenty of losses
there. even if lagged.



The boiler will inevitably short cycle leading to hugely reduced
efficiency - raw fuel chucked out the back before it fires... and heat
being lost in the boiler room itself as the boiler has to heat up, then
cool down, then heat up....

All about using systems in ways they were not designed to cope with.

Not to mention the fact that if the master stat is NOT in the office,
the boiler will stay pumping all the time.


If you consider that there is a fixed heat loss from the system via the
pipes, and a fixed amount of fuel lost when it starts up, you can see
that at very low outputs its nearly ALL being lost, and almost no output.

Of course unless the pipes run through the loft the heat will end up in
the house as a whole, but that is not what we are considering. We don't
want to heat the house, just one room.

Its a tsndar problem of modulating heat systems: There are fixed losses.
If iy wamp them by using high oputputs, they are insignificant. If you
throttle back they become very significant.

Guess why a 3 liter car no matter how efficient never returns the same
MPG even in a light body as a 1200 engine..the BIG engine has BIG
frictional losses. Its efficient enough at 100bhp but its woeful at 30bhp.



NT