"Daern's Instant Fortress" wrote in message
news:jdVmc.411$yp3.400@newsfe1-win...

"Owain" wrote in message
...
"Daern's Instant Fortress" wrote
| Our house has a very large conservatory, which was heated
| by a CH fed convector. ...

Moving to TRVs is generally regarded as a Good Thing, and may actually
be
required under Building Regulations (when you replace your boiler you
may
be
required to bring the whole system up to current standards).

However what you really should consider is putting your conservatory on
a
separate 'zone' on the heating system, so you can programme it with its
own
time and temp settings completely separately from the house. You will be
using a lot of heat to keep it warm in the depths of winter. Depending
on
how the plumbing is arranged this may be a fairly simple job adding a
zone
valve and an appropriate controller, or it may be a complete pain.

I'll reply once for Ed and Owain's replys, as you both say more or less
the
same thing:

I see where you are coming from with the seperate zones, but surely
turning
the TRVs down in the winter (or if we are not using the room) amounts to
the
same thing. The conservatory will be out of circuit and not using any
energy. Likewise, when the sun shines, the room is warm, the TRVs are off
and I'm not spending money. Am I missing some subtlety here?

Yes: the boiler is still on demand, and producing hot water (even though
it's not doing a lot since it'd only trying to heat the one un-TRVed rad.


As a general system question, when using TRVs, is it normal to *not* have
any room thermostats at all and what is the best practice for managing
this?
Should I have all of my rads with TRVs or just leave one without?

Leave one without and have a room thermostat sensing the temperature in the
('master') space that it heats. Then that 'stat can turn off the entire
system when that space is warm enough. It means you have to adjust the
valves on that rad so that it puts out little enough heat that the rest of
the house gets enough heat to satisfy their TRVs before the master space
gets too hot and the stat turns off, but hey! this is plumbing & heating,
not rocket science :-)

For a better system you'd have each space monitored and heating controlled
by its own thermostat, with the boiler told to provide heat when any of the
room 'stats demanded. Having 2 or more zones rather than treating the whole
house as one space is a step towards this ideal (and therefore A Good Thing
(tm) :-).