"No. Not common sense at all. Best have TRVs on all rads if possible and have a simple programmer, not a programmer/stat. People understand TRVs and simple time clocks. Wall stats create cold spots in the house, as what it senses is not representative"
Working on a series of contracts with about 15,000 tenanted properties in total I can quite simply say my experience suggests you are a bit wide of the mark, though perhaps we are making different points . Before part L the spec dictated to us by the Landlords was..typically.. combi & built in programmer & TRVs with no room stat. At first the complaints from tenants with this set up were only a trickle, but once tenant forums got wind of it the complaints flooded in and virtually all systems have been retrofitted with a simple room stat (honeywell). It may be true that in many cases the tenants just use them as a simple and convenient on/off switch, but there are plenty more who have learned to use them more intelligently, particularly the elderly on small pensions, for whom we mark up the room stats with suitable settings. My main occupation is servicing engineer so i get to meet an awful lot of tenants week by week, and believe it or not we do discuss with them the systems in their properties, and how to get the best out of them. The approval rating from tenants who have had a room stat retrofitted is pretty well 100%..and yes they are polled by the landlords for their tenant satisfaction ratings on work done..so we get both informal and formal feedback.
We can also give them a basic guide to settings..but occasionally the male (usually) of the houshold reckons everything from the boiler stat to the TRVs and room stat should be on full. (we've all found cyl stats on 90 after you KNOW you set it to 55 the previous year
).but you can't get through to all of them.
As I said, the system in my own house works spot on as far as i'm concerned, and we rarely touch any of the controls..ever...I quite fancy doing a solar water heating setup to run with the combi...I'm thinking about that one for a while before doing it though.
Each to his own i suppose
Alfredo
