Room heating speed.

[ericmark]

I have been living in mothers house for 18 months to look after her, it seems she is to be now put in a nursing home, so getting my house ready to move back into, while away the thermostat was set to 8°C to stop pipes freezing, today I turned up the heating at 1 pm to 20°C at 5 pm when ready to leave it was reporting just 12°C, I don't think it was really that cold, I think the air had not moved around enough, however the Myson fan assisted radiator had been going for the whole 4 hours so boiler had never turned off.

Down stairs there are two rooms which over lap each other one behind integral garage and one alongside the integral garage with an arch between them and the thermostat is one the dinning room to garage wall with a large radiator around the corner from it in centre of house, with open stairs above that central radiator, the dinning room radiator is full length under window, and there is a second radiator in the living room next to front door which is fan assisted.

At the moment I have changed default setting to 14°C but 4°C in 4 hours seems rather slow, the radiators are really hot they could not go hotter, so can't blame the boiler, and there is not really the room to fit a forth radiator in the pair of rooms. There is a large 4.5 kW gas fire so we can heat the room faster, but not thermostatically controlled, I am considering two things.

One is the rooms have heated up, and it is the thermostat being mounted on the cold garage to dinning room wall which has resulted in wrong readings, but the Myson fan did not stop and that fan is also thermostatically controlled, the fan is not set to maximum speed mother-in-law broke the knob off, and that model no longer made.

To speed up heating, thoughts are, simply open Myson and turn up speed, but then noisy, or put a fan on the dinning room radiator to push out more heat that end of the pair of rooms, there is no TRV on any down stairs radiators, and I have a thermostat for brewing beer which could switch fan on when cold or off when hot.

I note the new Myson has around 5 speeds and the thermostat selects the speed according to how close to target temperature the room is, can't quite do that, but could fit a thermostat to bypass the fan resistor when cold so fan full speed when cold half speed when getting near to set temperature and off when it hits set temperature.

I am open to ideas, when living in house it seemed OK, I would think walls store a lot of heat, and being at 8°C for last 4 months since batteries changed on thermostat everything in house is cold, will see what house is like tomorrow, but all ideas welcome.

[big-all]

i think you may be overthinking it a bit
you have a building with a few hundred off tonnes off structure acting like a cooling radiator
if your whole structure is around the average ambient temperature around this time off year say 5 degrees you need a massive amount off input to heat the structure to around the average level off heat that comfortable
but once there will need far far less energy once there as it is now a heat store with temperature change being quite slow

[ericmark]

Today returned sitting at 14°C around 2 pm by 7 pm it was at 18°C I don't think I have ever noticed how long it takes to warm up, within next few days we will be living there again so will not be allowed to get so cold.

[Nos]

We learnt this lesson a long time ago, as we were ardent caravaners we went away two or three times a month all year round just 2/3 nights sometimes longer, we at first did what you did and turned the heating down to frost setting, we always came back to a cold house and it always took two days at max power, and with the gas fire on, to get it comfortable again, after that we left the CH on its normal settings, back to a warm house and never noticed any difference in the bills. Nos