After some advice.
I have recently traced all the heating pipes in our house and discovered it is plumbed as a one pipe system.
There are actually in total five circuits each with there own balancing valve with only 2-3 radiators on them, it appears when new its was quite a high spec system, but I believe it will have been put in around 1965. Ring is 22mm, 15mm rad tails, 28mm back to boiler. Total of 18 rads and 2 towel rails.
Most of radiators work ok, but only if you turn the flow temp on the boiler right up and even then quiet a few are much closer to 'quite warm' than 'hot', with the return temperatures being very high, and where someone has bodged another two rads on for a porch/loo extension they obviously basically don't even get warm.
The boiler is a reasonably modern Viessmann Vitodens 100 35kW system boiler, which spends most of the time just ticking over, due to the high return temp.
Hence we are looking at what the options are in terms of improving performance, to get the time to heat the house more reasonable, and ideally to reduce the return temperature to improve boiler efficiency.
The way the pipes are run with 22mm flow and return basically parallel, it would not take much work anywhere there is access, to convert over to a two pipe system. This is great for the first floor where all the floors are up anyway for a whole house re-wire. However the ground floor is all under a fairly original looking oak flooring nailed into the floorboards, so lifting that is well down the desirable list!
In a moment of madness my current best plan is to convert the first floor (and the rad that descend off it) into a two pipe system including moving the porch onto this as we can drop pipes in a cupboard, and then run the output of the boiler through the two ground floor circuits first for the two main rooms and hallway (five rads), and then run the 'return' from that into newly rehashed two pipe system on the first floor and back to the boiler. Adjust the flow temp and pump speed to get a good return temp and overall performance.
My thinking being we get the best of both worlds, hot feed into the single-pipe system where we cant re-pipe it, and then nice easy to balance normal two pipe system for the rest of the house, with low return temps to boost?
I will get a drawing of the full system uploaded once drawn, but thoughts welcome!
Daniel
I have recently traced all the heating pipes in our house and discovered it is plumbed as a one pipe system.
There are actually in total five circuits each with there own balancing valve with only 2-3 radiators on them, it appears when new its was quite a high spec system, but I believe it will have been put in around 1965. Ring is 22mm, 15mm rad tails, 28mm back to boiler. Total of 18 rads and 2 towel rails.
Most of radiators work ok, but only if you turn the flow temp on the boiler right up and even then quiet a few are much closer to 'quite warm' than 'hot', with the return temperatures being very high, and where someone has bodged another two rads on for a porch/loo extension they obviously basically don't even get warm.
The boiler is a reasonably modern Viessmann Vitodens 100 35kW system boiler, which spends most of the time just ticking over, due to the high return temp.
Hence we are looking at what the options are in terms of improving performance, to get the time to heat the house more reasonable, and ideally to reduce the return temperature to improve boiler efficiency.
The way the pipes are run with 22mm flow and return basically parallel, it would not take much work anywhere there is access, to convert over to a two pipe system. This is great for the first floor where all the floors are up anyway for a whole house re-wire. However the ground floor is all under a fairly original looking oak flooring nailed into the floorboards, so lifting that is well down the desirable list!
In a moment of madness my current best plan is to convert the first floor (and the rad that descend off it) into a two pipe system including moving the porch onto this as we can drop pipes in a cupboard, and then run the output of the boiler through the two ground floor circuits first for the two main rooms and hallway (five rads), and then run the 'return' from that into newly rehashed two pipe system on the first floor and back to the boiler. Adjust the flow temp and pump speed to get a good return temp and overall performance.
My thinking being we get the best of both worlds, hot feed into the single-pipe system where we cant re-pipe it, and then nice easy to balance normal two pipe system for the rest of the house, with low return temps to boost?
I will get a drawing of the full system uploaded once drawn, but thoughts welcome!
Daniel