Would leaving boiler on all day increase bill?

[Mikefromlondon]

Well blimey! Thankyou everyone who participated in this post. Some very interesting points made. It will be interesting for future reference to see how much +/- the bill is. We normally leave both the CH & HW on continuously and use the room stat to switch the CH. However due to the buzzing problem I now switch the boiler off at the isolator spur before I head up the wooden hill. My initial feeling was that as the heating would be on all day the house would be warm and therefore the boiler wouldn't have to graft as much. Once again many thanks

It only makes a little difference, so why not leave it on 24/7, eavryone pays extra for the comfirt, if you travell First Class in a train or a plane, you pay for that extra comfirt, if you want to conserve your bank balance, then you buy the lowest fare, like wise if you can't affoard full time heating then have it on timer, I live and work from home, so have to have it on 24/7, and my bills are only just a little more than if we used a timer, and the hassle of it, and the periods when the house goes completely cold in between, you don't get anything for nothing, even the timed heat costs just as much since it will have to reheat the entire contents of your house, furniture, beddings, and so on, so there is really no logic to this, but by having it on 24/7, using moderate temperature on the boiler flow, you get best of both worlds.

You heat your house to the required temeperature, there after your consumption falls as you are only topping up heat loss through your poor insulated house. If you can insulate your house better, you will save more, but by using continuous heating you get fulll comfirt at marginally extra cost, .

 

[Mikefromlondon]

Well blimey! Thankyou everyone who participated in this post. Some very interesting points made. It will be interesting for future reference to see how much +/- the bill is. We normally leave both the CH & HW on continuously and use the room stat to switch the CH. However due to the buzzing problem I now switch the boiler off at the isolator spur before I head up the wooden hill. My initial feeling was that as the heating would be on all day the house would be warm and therefore the boiler wouldn't have to graft as much. Once again many thanks

It only makes a little difference, so why not leave it on 24/7, eavryone pays extra for the comfirt, if you travell First Class in a train or a plane, you pay for that extra comfirt, if you want to conserve your bank balance, then you buy the lowest fare, like wise if you can't affoard full time heating then have it on timer, I live and work from home, so have to have it on 24/7, and my bills are only just a little more than if we used a timer, and the hassle of it, and the periods when the house goes completely cold in between, you don't get anything for nothing, even the timed heat costs just as much since it will have to reheat the entire contents of your house, furniture, beddings, and so on, so there is really no logic to this, but by having it on 24/7, using moderate temperature on the boiler flow, you get best of both worlds.

You heat your house to the required temeperature, there after your consumption falls as you are only topping up heat loss through your poor insulated house. If you can insulate your house better, you will save more, but by using continuous heating you get fulll comfirt at marginally extra cost, .

Intersetingly, I do not even use the room state, as it is left permanently on at 35degrees, so we just let our boiler run continuously heating the rads to about 35 degrees, so it is set to the boilers lowest temeperature, of 35 degrees flow. which is just barely a degeree or two more than a human body core temperature! this provides around 18 to 19 degrees in the house when the outside temperatures are around 7 to 8 degrees.
and maintains a more or less a steady temeperature. The boiler cycles outmatically every 10 or so minutes to mainatain this flow temeperature.

Only during freezing spells I may have to turn it up to 50 degrees flow temperature, and during a cold spell we all have to pay more for heating our homes, timed or not.

 

[plumbplumb]

I was being sarcastic.

I have no idea of building, boiler, system design, house size, heat loss, area, energy saving controls, insulation.

 

[Mikefromlondon]

Oh come on! you don't need a masters degree in this! the more you will use the more you will pay for, but try and use less by bringing the teperature down so all those silly formulas goes out of the window, you shut your window! and try to conserve your haet loss and draw your curtains, they could save an additional 0.00345% in bills if you want to be precise and scientific!

 

[ALEC1]

all my heating systems are on all day, and they consume around 15-20% less gas because they use compensation controls..

on does not mean firing all day, in my vernacular it means being available to fire to meet certain programmed temperatures, the technology looks at the need to fire and minimises the gas usage....

it all is a far cry from numpty on-off controls...and the idea that heating should respond to our need for heat rather than the buildings...

I am glad though that we all agree that off means no energy usage... probably the only thing we can agree on...

 

[Mikefromlondon]

totally agree, I often pop into my neighbours houses, quite a few around! and whenever i have gone to their homes, they are bloody freezing! their occupants are seen dazed wondering in two thick jumpers, and an extra slack or two underneath! when i ask them how expensive the heating bills are, and they would say to me yup! they just paid £250! and they have it on a timer as they go out to work and switch their heating off when they are not home! and put it one when they arrive home from work! so from 6pm to 10pm!

and similarly they put it on from 7am till 9 am, their boilers are set at 70 degrees flow temperature, almost to a point you cannot touch it with your fingers for more than 5 seconds!

when i compare this to my 24/7 comfirt level where I can be walking in a T shirt, and if my wife would allow me in my underpants! i got by just paying an extra £50, as my bill came to £300!

All for an extra £50 I don't have to wear two cardigans, and two pairs of slacks! (I am a man by the way! )

 

[Mikefromlondon]

sorry misposted, i was meant to edit my above post! brains going!

 

[Agile]

sorry misposted, i was meant to edit my above post!

brains going!

Yes, we can see that.

You like to wear cool clothing and keep your heating on all the time.

Most houses lose about 10 kW when freezing outside so its costing you about 50p per hour to run it. Thats the same cost if you are in or out.

 

[Mikefromlondon]

sorry misposted, i was meant to edit my above post!

brains going!

Yes, we can see that.

You like to wear cool clothing and keep your heating on all the time.

Most houses lose about 10 kW when freezing outside so its costing you about 50p per hour to run it. Thats the same cost if you are in or out.

seriously though, be carefull! it seems to be contagious! seems like yours is also going!

so work that out, 10kw loss of heat! at 5p/kw, that should cost me £1080.00 per quarter!

Check your formula again mate!

I only paid with meters read and not estimated £301.00,
so rearrange your formula and factor it by a third, then you might get close to reality.

(Did you factor in my so called delta factor would be low as my flow temeprature is kept well below many boilers on the market can't even operate at that low tempertaure of 35 degrees flow, yes its an old Vaillant VCW221, one of the least efficient boilers! but wow, it doesn't need replacing yet.)

Ok, I will compromise here, factor it by half if not a third, as the 90 days period was relatively mild, thyere was only a month of really cold weather and we even had the snow!

 

[Agile]

Read what I said.

Most of the time its not freezing outside.

People never appreciate how much energy costs.

Tony

 

[Mikefromlondon]

Read what I said.

Most of the time its not freezing outside.

People never appreciate how much energy costs.

Tony

yes i agree i did mention that the period of my last gas bill was relatively mild, (oct 7 to 20th jan)

I do appreciate how much it costs, I am highly energy concious, and much more than you can imagine, however, I am balancing my needs against hike in the price of energy,

I know exactly how much heat equals in 1kilo watt, in electrical terms, and in terms of how much heat it would generate in 1 hour, I know the feel of it, as I have one of these fan heaters to boost my bedroom temperature for about 15 minutes, it heats up the whole room quite well from about 18C to 20 in that time, leave it for an hour and it would reach even 22 or more.

and I know exactly how many kilo watts are there in a cubic meter of gas, (just for a quick conversion, multiply by 11 x cubic meter) and if you have an imperial gas meter multiply the meter reading (per 100 cubic feet) by a factor of 33. this is just a rough guid to estimate how much gas you have used, I predicted that for my neighbour and his bill came exactly £245.00. its good enough for estimating consumption.

So I do keep a tab on my gas use and monitor the situation and felt that it suits me best if I ran constant background heat at lower temperature.


Luckily, for me i am with eon, they offer enough discounts for Direct debit, online billing, and dual fuel, it works out 10% on gas and 8% on electric, such that it nullifies the first higher terrif, so my energy prices are less than 5p for gas, its around 4 p, and for electric it is around 12p per kilo watt hour.

 

[Master of None]

...and finally, as has been pointed out, heat loss is a function of dekta t between inside and out, and in the UK this changes a great deal. over a 24 hour period......

and however much you complicate the question, there is no way that 24 hours heating can ever be less than partial heating. 24-hours heating will always use more energy.

Totally agree, however you need to decide what you are willing to pay for comfort.
I honestly think that the difference between letting a house cool during the day and having the boiler running full tilt for hours getting it back up to temperature or running at set temperatures would be very little difference.
In my opinion increasing the insulation properties of the house would (almost) compensate.
Of course size of house makes a difference. For instance- my girlfriend insists on turning off the radiators in bedrooms not used, however she leaves the doors open to these rooms, then complains that our bedroom is not hot enough. I have tried to explain that she is not saving energy but the radiator in our room is trying to heat the whole of the upstairs. She sees it as one radiator on 2 radiators off saves energy. Not the case.

I recon if everyone was educated in how a heating system work, had efficient controls and saved energy by not heating rooms which are not used it could reduce the UKs energy consumption by at least 20%, without coming home to a cold house.......

 

[big-all]

Luckily, for me i am with eon, they offer enough discounts for Direct debit, online billing, and dual fuel, it works out 10% on gas and 8% on electric, such that it nullifies the first higher terrif, so my energy prices are less than 5p for gas, its around 4 p, and for electric it is around 12p per kilo watt hour.

eehh have you tried shopping around
i pay 3.4p per kw for gas and 10.8p per kw electric before discounts

 

[Mikefromlondon]

@ master of none : thats exactly right!

I had a huge double rad in our front pasage, one day it had to come off as I wanted the wall behind skimmed, after the skim, the thing never went back, and believe me my house has not felt cold or missed its heat, yes the only disadvantage I had was i could no longer dry my clothes on it, it was a huge 6 or 7 foot in length! bloody huge thing it was! think of it how much energy it was wasting that we did not need after all! you never feel cold inmy 3 bed house except the two not in use rooms that we do not even have any rads in them, the doors are kept shut!

My bedroom measures 13x 10, and has a single rad of 4 foot right next to my bed, and keeps the room snugly warm, but when you want any extra heat, we just boost it with a 1kw fan heater, and never allow it run for longer than 15 to 20 minutes, just enough time while getting undressed and getting into the bed, then it is turned off, and we sleep warm. and I sleep right under my windown and get some bloody draft from the wooden frame even though the window is double glazed! you feel this cold draft coming down from the seals of the window that is well over 25 years old!

 

[Mikefromlondon]

Luckily, for me i am with eon, they offer enough discounts for Direct debit, online billing, and dual fuel, it works out 10% on gas and 8% on electric, such that it nullifies the first higher terrif, so my energy prices are less than 5p for gas, its around 4 p, and for electric it is around 12p per kilo watt hour.

eehh have you tried shopping around
i pay 3.4p per kw for gas and 10.8p per kw electric before discounts

that is a very good price, you might care to tell me either here or send a message and who by?

my exact price is 3.552p and electric is 11.66p excluding vat 5%

sends you my thanks!