Itsallaguess wrote:BullDog wrote:
Easy solution to swap single radiator for double if you can. Anyway, oversized radiator will be better output with lower return temperature.
I have got to the stage now where I think only major expenditure will result in lower energy consumption. And the pay back at that point is very uneconomic.
I agree, and if we can get through a winter without having to use the gas-fire whilst maintaining good level of boiler-only comfort, then I think a radiator swap-out might be on the cards to then achieve a lower running temperature again, but that's probably something for next summer now, which gives me another winter to see if there's a good justification for it.
I think beyond this little experiment, we're also likely to then be in the same position as you, where more major decisions might need to be made for any further improvements in our situation, but the last couple of years has mainly been about cutting back to a still-comfortable base-line on gas and electricity energy-use, and then once we've achieved that, I really don't mind the idea of investing additional funds into targeted areas, as we're in a much better position now to see where those beneficial areas might be, and we also now have a good understanding of the various options available to us by which to potentially move forwards.
For me it's not necessarily been about making the largest absolute monetary savings, but getting ourselves into a position where there's no daft levels of
wastage (of which it's clear to me now that there was rather a lot of, going by my earlier rolling 12-month figures), and where we can then improve things from that improved position.
A couple of colder-months on from the above posts, I thought I'd provide a quick update on our home-heating situation.
We've been much better over the last couple of months with using a more focussed central-heating process, where generally speaking and when the house is occupied, we'll heat the whole house to a comfortable temperature during the afternoons and over tea-time, and then once people are later settled into their living spaces for the evening, we'll turn off any radiators outside of those living spaces and only leave on the ones where people are settled for the night. Accepting that variations in outside temperatures make direct energy-use comparisons difficult, I think I've got a good enough handle on our historical week-to-week gas usage to clearly see that this shift to a more focussed radiator usage-pattern is already saving some further gas costs.
Our biggest revelation however, has come from a big improvement to the 'downstairs knocked-through living-rooms with a single undersized radiator' situation, where we were previously finding on the colder evenings that we needed regular addition heat from our poor-efficiency living-flame gas-fire to adequately heat that overly-large downstairs living area.
Given that replacing the under-sized radiator isn't something that's likely to happen this winter, we were toying with the idea of increasing the heat-output from the boiler to see if the existing radiator could be tempted to do a better job of warming our large downstairs rooms, but it was also in the back of my mind that we had a large pair of heavy, lined curtains at the back of our 'other room' in the knocked-through configuration, that offered up an opportunity to install an additional curtain-rail 'above and behind' the knocked-through dividing-wall that sits centrally to our large downstairs living area.
The idea behind this test was that for the sake of around £25 for a nice-looking curtain-rail, and the drilling of six holes to hold the rail-brackets above the wall-arch area, and where the rail and rail-brackets would then normally be 'invisible' from the side of the knocked-through rooms where we'd normally be located in our sitting area, it would be an interesting low-cost and low-impact experiment to see if
halving that large knocked-through living space with a pair of heavy, lined-curtains would then allow the undersized-radiator in that 'thermally reduced' living space to be more efficiently heated.
And what a job it's done...
We missed out on trying this experiment in that really cold week at the start of December, but in the past 10 days or so where we have now been able to close those inter-dividing curtains during the evenings, we've felt a
huge improvement in warmth and comfort, with clear confirmation on just what a good job those heavy curtains are doing being seen if we cross through them later in the evenings, from what is then a much warmer 'front room' area and into that 'back room' area beyond the curtains.
The temperature difference between the two 'rooms' is very noticeable, and has made a huge difference for us even taking into account the fact that we've already seen a marked difference only when using the undersized-radiator up to now, and so if and when the weather turns much colder again, similar to that first week in December, I fully expect that even if we need to use the gas-fire, we'll see an additionally-large comfort-benefit again from only having to use it to heat our smaller 'curtained-off room' capacity, where it's not also being asked to heat what would normally have been the larger twin-room configuration.
A few posts back, where I was discussing rolling twelve-month gas usage, I thought that the large reductions in kwh figures that we've managed to generate over recent years was probably the bulk of the low-hanging fruit, but after our recent move to a much more focussed radiator-usage pattern and this revelatory 'dividing-curtain' experiment, I'm now encouraged that we'll see some further meaningful kwh reductions in gas-usage this winter, but also beyond that, I'm happy to also now know that in a downstairs living area that we've had trouble making comfortable for many years now during these colder winter months, we'll also now be getting a higher level of comfort from the gas-heating
that we are using, even beyond the gas that we're continuing to try and save...
Cheers,
Itsallaguess
loves throwing good money after bad... hs2, smart motorways, migrant hotels, Rwanda, foreign aid, net zero covid inquiry, heat pumps... the list of billions wasted bonkers. Wish they'd listen to their actual voters.