In message ,
"Andrew Mawson" wrote:


wrote in message
oups.com...
Dont want to appear thick but "The radiators need to be connected in
parallel -
not in series - of course." What does that mean?.

Thanks Set Square and also GymRatz for the reply.


In a conventional modern two pipe system, you have a 'flow' (from the
boiler) and a 'return' (back to the boiler) pipe and all your
radiators connect from one to the other and thus are in parallel.

Years ago it was not uncommomon to have a 'one pipe' system, where a
single pipe ran arround the area to be heated from the output to the
input of the boiler, and each radiator was in parallel with a short
section of this pipe (usually the length of the radiator) - this is
the system often found in schools and municiple buildings - the pipe
often being 2" black iron. Here effectively the radiators are in
series with each other.


My mother-in-law has a really odd system that seems to have been
originally a DIY install, probably 30 or 40 years ago. Some aspects are
rather good - curved radiators in the bay windows for example - but
others are decidedly silly; there is no room thermostat and she
regulates the house temperature by adjusting the boiler thermostat.

The layout of the pipework is rather complicated too and appears to be a
mixture of three different systems thus:

+-rad-+
-------+-----+----+-----rad----+
Boiler rad |
------------------+------------+

The leftmost radiator is in the standard single-pipe layout, the middle
one is in what is commonly used these days ("parallel") and the last one
appears to be in series, though shutting it off doesn't seem to affect
other radiators in the house so it may not be (I know it wouldn't affect
them in the diagram above, but the house obviously has rather more
than three radiators and the rad in question is near the boiler so is
hardly likely to be at the end of a run).

All pipework is in half inch (probably).

I'm sure it could be improved but "it works fine for me" so it isn't
likely to be any time soon :-)

Hwyl!

M.

--
Martin Angove: http://www.tridwr.demon.co.uk/
Two free issues: http://www.livtech.co.uk/ Living With Technology
.... All you folks do not exist. My sysop types all this stuff in.