On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 22:33:45 GMT, Velvet wrote:



I keep the house to a fairly normal cycle of heat even when I'm not
there for a weekend (tend not to be gone any longer than that) because I
have pets who, though they'd no doubt survive, would take a while to
acclimatise to lower temps, and then have to acclimatise to higher ones
again - and other pets who will simply end up with their own heaters
running constantly to keep them up to temp. With that in mind, the stat
never sets itself below about 12C at any time day or night, and while
daytimes are cooler than if I'm around, they're still no lower than 16,
with a burst of a couple of degrees of an evening.

My previous experiences with letting a house cool to around 10C is that
it took hours, literally hours and hours, to warm back up again.
Possibly even longer than that - a day, maybe. It wasn't this place so
I'm not sure how much of that was the heating (different system, not
going to start an argument so won't say what it was).


I'm perfectly happy with the stat dropping to 11 or 12 overnight,
because at the moment (well, before this recent cold spell) it's never
got down beyond 14 or so. Me personally I don't mind if it drops below
that, cos I have a thick duvet and prefer a cold rather than hot room to
sleep in. But getting up in the morning I'm conscious of how long the
heating runs for to bring it back up to temperature, vs how often and
long it runs for if it's just maintaining the steady temp.

That's how I got to wondering which one actually does use more gas, and
therefore, costs more... and searched the web, but to no avail, no
concrete examples and theories that demonstrate the differences between
the two methods seem to exist. And whilst I'd give it a go as a home
experiment, I know the weather's too variable to make the results
worthwhile.

Oh well. Ta for the replies. Anyone else?

Well...... you've introduced additional information that you have
animals who require an environment influenced by the room temperature.

If there are a significant number of them or more to the point their
enclosures and the energy requirements, then the cost difference of
energy for the house may well become irrelevant. If the heating for
the enclosures is electric, then that is costing 3-4 times the gas
cost anyway.

If economy is a real issue for you, then insulating the animal
enclosures makes sense.

I've done this for an enclosure housing two creatures who like to have
an environment of about 29 degrees and 80% humidity. It was a
challenging project, but I made a significant difference on
electricity use with insulation to avoid heatloss to the room.






Velvet

..andy

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