Originally Posted by
Jasper Warwick
An update on my experiences with the HouseHeat System; Over the last couple of years I have been gradually adding more HouseHeat controls to the central heating system in our 4 story house. We now have 6 room controls and 10 radiator valves. On the whole it has been a pretty painless experience, the batteries seem to last about two years which is very reasonable and they have made big savings in our fuel bills I would say we have cut our gas usage by about 20,000 Kw hours per year (£700) over the last 4 years. OK not all of this is down to the HouseHeat System, some of it is doing things like not heating the hall, keeping doors closed, having the windows professionally draft proofed. The system does require quite a bit of maintenance and checking to make sure it is working properly, programs get messed up and sometimes radiators loose the connection to the control box but all in all the effort is not that great and the benefits are huge. Generally I spend a little bit of time at the start of the autumn checking the system and then it tends to run smoothly for the rest of the winter.
The big change this year was the addition of the FHT 8W BoilerConnect box which links the individual room thermostats to the master boiler thermostat. I had put off adding this for a couple of years as I wa snot sure how tricky it would be to install and they were also over £200. This year I found that the price had dropped to under £100 so I took the risk and bought one. Installing it was a doddle I replaced the old central heating thermostat with the control box on the middle landing. I was planning to move it to the boiler cupboard but I am glad I now left it in full view. Programming it was very straight forward.
We have now started to use it on a day to day basis and I now wish I had bought one ages ago. The house is always warm and the boiler never seems to be running. I now leave the central heating on all the time and just use the timers on the room thermostats to control the boiler at night when I go to bed a quick visual glance at the control box tells me if I have forgotten to turn down one of the room thermostats and shows me which zones are requesting heat from the boiler.
Our central heating pump was also getting a bit noisy so I had it replaced with a variable speed pump which was about £70 more than the traditional pump but again it will more than pay for itself over the lifetime of the pump in terms of the reduced electricity that it it will use.
All in all I am very pleased with the system.