having thermosat in every room instead of tvr's

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As part of my renovation planning, I'm thinking of setting up the following for heating:

Using underfloor heating manifolds to control radiators (3-5 on ground floor, 4 on 1st with potential for 2 more on 2nd floor if it ever gets built).

Having programmable thermostat (eventually replaced by raspberry pi + monitoring and switching hardware controlled which im working on at the moment) in each room, control the actuators on the manifold.


question is, given that every tom, d*** and harry is banging on about putting TRV's on every radiator because BC requires it... do they actually require TRV's or a method of controlling the temp in each room?
IE will my individual thermostat and room control be sufficient for BC or would they insist on having TRV's?
 
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If you have too much money and want to get rid of it, thermostats and motorised valves will work just as well as TRVs and a room stat.
 
Changed Nakajo

JohnD - i did initially think about that but cost of the valves put me off and given that i will already need a manifold of part of the underfloor, i may as well just extend that.

The question really is will BC care if its a thermostat on the wall in every room, instead of TRV's or will it come down to the competency and understanding of the person(s) signing it off?
 
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How do you plan to make each electrical thermostat mounted on walls regulate the flow through each radiator?

Nozzle
 
Nozzle:
Each radiator (or room of radiators if more then one) connected to underfloor manifold, each of the output/inputs for the manifold is controlled by the thermostat for that room, and call for heat on boiler.

eg for my bedroom,
1 radiator plumbed into one port on the manifold. The roomstat will control the actuator for that port on the manifold, (in effect the same as having a zone valve for each room!)

in effect think of it more as the house heating is designed as wet ufh (just with a radiator on it rather then long loop of pipe), rather then the traditional flow/return loop central heating.
 
Yes it'll work; yes it'll satisfy BRs - and in many ways is better than TRVs in that you can have a separate program for every room. When we moved up here in the late 60s, the bungalow at the top of the street had been done like that - stat and motorised valve for every room !

However, where TRVs are better is that they provide modulated flow through the rads - so when the room is "getting up to temperature" the rad output will reduce gradually rather than shutting down. With stats and motorised* valves, the rads will be in on-off mode and room temperature will go up and down a couple of degrees as the system cycles.

Other thoughts ...
I wouldn't have thought it great to run the rads of the same manifold as the UFH - the UFH needs a relatively low temperature so unless you have enormous rads they will under-perform. Also, you could reduce plumbing by going for a "traditional" rad layout and using a thermal-wax actuator on the radiator valve - just like a TRV head but it's got a wax capsule and electric heater element. If someone wanted to go back to "normal" controls, it would be easy to just swap the heads for a thermostatic one (assuming you choose the right valve body).

Have you considered something like ZigBee or Z-Wave (one of them is one-way, the other allows two-way communication IIRC) ? You can get replacement TRV heads with radio control in them - so they could be re-programmed by the system controller as required to provide as complex a daily temperature profile as needed, while retaining the proportional control of TRVs.
Whether I'll find the time is another matter, but I had in mind taking feedback from the heads and altering the flow temperature to suit (ie as the heads throttle back lower the flow temperature**) either by weather comp on the boiler, or a motorised mixing valve off a thermal store if we get round to building the extension (we don't have room for a cylinder at the moment).


* In your proposal, "motorised" includes the thermal-wax actuator head on the manifold.

** My idea was to keep the system with a reasonable flow at all times - thus giving rads which have a fairly uniform temperature rather than a hot spot near the inlet when on low output. Either by monitoring the flow rate, or getting feedback from the TRVs as to their position.

EDIT: If you did go for thermal actuators on the rads or a manifold and room stats, try and find a stat that can be set to little (or no) hysteresis. The wax capsules can take several minutes to operate, so it's easy to get a system that overshoots and oscillates. The less the hysteresis, the less the chance of that - Honeywell told me*** that their heads were completely OK to operate in a pseudo-proportional mode with no limits on how often the supply was switched on & off.

*** At my last job I was involved in the office heating and cooling. The initial aircon controls were mechanical stats on the wall - and with several degrees of hysteresis we really did get problems of the system cycling very uncomfortably. As in :
Stat calls for cooling, during the 2 minutes it takes valve to open the room warms up some more. Cooling kicks in, and it takes a few minutes to bring the room back down to temperature, and then a few minutes more to go down by the hysteresis in the stat. So by the time the stat opens, the wax capsule is "well heated".
Stat finally opens, but valve takes 5-7 minutes to close during which time the cooling is still running. So room over-cools before the cycle starts again.
In some cases, it would even cycle between heating and cooling because the overshoot was that great.
 
We essentially have this sort of system. Two manifolds (one downstairs, one upstairs) splitting the house into 12 zones. No underfloor heating: all radiators so the different temperature aspect doesn't come into it. Heatmiser networked stats in each room, two Heatmiser wiring centres and a network access box. We can reprogram each room on it's own or turn the whole house off and on from our phones. Works really well.
 
I have programmable stats in each room but for UFH.

The upside is temperature control is good, the whole house is evenly heated with no draughts or cold spots. Seems economical too. The downside is you need to change each thermostat/program when you go away! What a ball ache! I've resorted to adding a separate programmer over all the others which controls the 'whole house' and therefore provides holiday programming. In effect it switches off the whole heating system to my desired programme and holiday schedule.

Robbie's networked stats is the way forward however. I need to see what can be done to network my Wavin/Jablotron stats. Networking was promised when I installed the controls last year but does not seem to have been made available in the UK. I have found a Czech supplied one but am currently struggling with the Czech online shops!
 
Thanks for the replies - I guess i'll continue my work on programming up a raspberry pi to become the programmer for me! - will be a long project i think. Just found out that i may need to use piles instead of strip foundations so budget for heating my disappear for a while!
 
Networking was promised when I installed the controls last year but does not seem to have been made available in the UK.
In the IT world, that's called vapourware. Sometimes it condenses into something real, but mostly it just disappears without trace.
Vapourware is about as reliable as salesmen's promises :rolleyes:
 

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