Heating zones

[RF Lighting]

My parents own a house. It used to consist of a standard 3 bedroom house with a post office. My father has recently retired, and the post office has closed for business. My parents are planning to convert the old post office into a dining room and downstairs bathroom.

The work required to do this is going to be quite extensive and require the room to be stripped right back to bare brick and joists, and then start a fresh. We plan to insulate the heck out of the new rooms, so the heat loss will be quite different to the rest of the house.

The house is a 1950s build with a 30 year old boiler which we are happy to keep running until it finally gives up the ghost.

Whilst we've got the opportunity, would it be a good idea to put this room onto it's own zone with an independent roomstat and zone valve, or am I as well to just leave it on the existing ground floor circuit.

Assume this was your house and money was no object, what would you do?

 

[Dan Robinson]

Zoning off areas with different heat loss characteristics is a good idea IMHO.


My place is zoned down to individual room level.

 

[RF Lighting]

How did you do it dan? Have you got loads of zone valves or did you use something like these programmable TRVs you can get now?

 

[Dan Robinson]

Honeywell Evo.

However, I re did the heating system from scratch.

Downstairs is UFH as a large single zone (all open plane).

Upstairs are rads.

However, I have plumbed them back to a central manifold with a wireless room stat in each room that talks back to the central controller.

The system works as if it is all UFH.

However, if that is too much work, you can use HR92 rad valve heads to give you the same effect.

Evo will do up to 12 heating zones PLUS hot water and internet control.

Each room is them optimised by the software depending on the program.


Not the cheapest, but certainly the best way to zone a system and maintain a central pont of control.

Did a job recently where they had 25 zones. We did use thimble sensors back to 5 locations where there were clusters of programmable stats.

We could have done it in Evo, but were over ruled by the client.


They will have fun when it comes to go on holiday



Well, actually we did put a master timer down by the boiler.... but will they remember it is there?

 

[RF Lighting]

Thanks dan will have a look at the evo. Is it easy enough to use bearing in mind my parents are at the latter end of their 60s? Would this sort of system be overkill for two or possibly three heating zones?

I've done a big heating system which was 10 zones of underfloor heating downstairs and 2 zones of rads upstairs, but that must have been at least ten years ago before technology was up to it and was all manual room stat and relay controlled.

 

[Dan Robinson]

It's easy to use once it is set up.


If just doing three zones, can the system not be split with zone valves - then you do by area rather than room.