As some us will be working from home this winter and with the Gas prices shooting up. I have a question about central heating.
I live in a medium+ size house and during the day normally the heating if off as we are all in work / school etc.
This winter I will be WFH so the house will needed to be heated.
My study is approx 14m³, it has two small windows , double glazed
I sit in front of the window so my foot gets quite cold as the cold drops from the window towards my feet.
Would it be better to get a small electric heater and heat that space only during the day or turn on the gas central heating. There is a door to the study so it will be closed.
Considering electric is almost 4x more expensive than gas per kWh.
I would welcome any opinion thoughts on this topic .
As we are home most of the time I run my heating 24/7 using the thermostat to control the heat setting as required. The house fabric never gets cold and the fact that the boiler only does heat maintenance burns reflects in the consumption being fairly static over the last 15 years or so. However, I have wall and thick roof insulation, and good double glazing, so I know that the heat is not being lost. If you have similar insulation then 24/7 might work for you too.
AS DW, i also keep my heating on 24/7 since about the middle 90's , and we just set the thermostate to around 16/17 overnight or if we leave for the day or longer
Works really well, and i seem to remember it was actually cheaper to run in the old house , 1904 with poor insulation , floorboards
Quite a few places and system now advise this approach rather than. the OFF / ON
As DW has said it keeps the house fabric that much warmer.
As to the cost to run a electric fire, you can work that out , to some extent , if you know the KW of the heater and your KW/H tariff rate , just depends on how often its on, if its controlled by a thermostat
Or perhaps look at what you can do with the window , maybe a piece of cloth , like a draught excluder across the bottom of window
etaf wrote: ↑Mon Oct 18, 2021 2:22 pm
Or perhaps look at what you can do with the window , maybe a piece of cloth , like a draught excluder across the bottom of window
The issue is not draft , they are good double glazing units.
As air circulates around the room via convection the warmish air in the room hits the cold glass it drops to the floor. That is where my foot is !
Look at a tube heater for your foot area, a 2' to 3' long should give some comfort, they are not expensive and you can buy guards too; they use about same wattage as the older incandescent light bulbs, plus you could mount it on a block of wood. Though they are often sold for greenhouses, I have one under my towel rad to keep towels warm when the heating is not on and one in my loft with a frost stat to save the tank freezing.
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my thought
gas at 1/3 keep the heating on in the area you use it most and minimize it in other room
yes you will use perhaps 3 or 4 times the energy heating your main space but the heat creap where the energy goes to surrounding rooms will not be wasted as those rooms will not require heating in there own right as the heat will escape so in effect heat the whole house from the overly heated centre with the odd boost if not enough heat escapes and warms the whole house
using electric will simply cost far more as a more expensive way off warming an area
as an aside i only ever have the heating on in the sitting room attached to the kitchen at about 23-24 degrees as i find that comfortable
the bathroom extension is normally the only other room normally with heat input
all rooms in the house are perfectly warm as the heat transfer will keep them at 16 degrees plus that most people will be happy with the option is there to turn heat on but not often used
If you are mostly sedentary while working, heat yourself rather than the room, much cheaper. Warm clothes, hot water bottle, electric heat pad are all options.
I have a USB heated gillet I wear in the winter, works very well. My partner WFH and last winter used hot water bottles, worked great but a bit of a faff so this year we have an electric heat pad on her office chair.
You could source a WW2 Irvine flying suit, plug that in and keep toasty Have you thought about moving your desk opposite the window to an inner wall. Light source behind but no cold spot.
Number of points, first gas boilers can modulate, but lowest setting is around 6 kW, so to extract the heat from the boiler either 6 kW of radiators or the boiler will be cycling. Once the boiler starts to cycle, you will get a hysteresis so not sure how well it will work.
However I have 9 electronic TRV heads, each one can be programmed so I can select when each room is heated, but to only heat some rooms clearly doors need to be closed.
The stumbling block for me is to trigger the boiler. Main thermostat is in the hall, about central to the house, which means it is the slowest point to cool, so not ideal, and although Nest Gen 3 it seems are making temperature sensors to get around the problem, they don't seem to be on the UK market yet, so question is how to get boiler to run?
There are it seems two methods, one is a wifi link, the other is careful setting of wall thermostat and TRV, but it only works when temperature is increasing, not when cooling, so if for example I set my TRV to 17 degs C and wall thermostat to 20 degs C then the TRV should turn off before the wall thermostat so other rooms are still heated, only on a very warm day will the wall thermostat turn off. But once wall thermostat turns off, then no heating until that room cools.
The net result is every home is different.
However what thermostat do you have? With Hive easy just fit a Hive electronic TRV to your work room, same with EvoHome, and Drayton Wiser, think also Todo does the same.
I find the house does not cool that fast, 8 am to 4 pm heating off middle of winter maybe it drops 3 degs C, daughter lived in a listed building, with that house it could drop 10 degs C
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Have you thought about moving your desk opposite the window to an inner wall. Light source behind but no cold spot.