Originally posted by bruce_miranda
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My solution is low tech - I'm insulating all the pipes under the house. In answer to someones question earlier in the thread, no, most of the pipes are not currently lagged. The main 22mm manifold from the boiler in one corner of the house to a central underfloor location has that old fashioned fabric weave lagging but all the pipes from the manifold to the radiators are completely un-insulated, and some of the runs are quite long like 5 metres worth of 8mm microbore...one new run of 15mm PVC that an engineer installed for the living room when we first moved in turned out to be literally just lying in the dirt on the ground...
I managed to finish about half of it last weekend before I was exhausted and sore all over from crawling around in the gravel and dirt in the crawl space. It's pretty tight in a few places, I managed to get stuck in a hole through an underfloor brick wall at one point but managed to free myself and discovered that I'm not claustrophobic as I first thought I might be, as I kept my cool and didn't panic. So by the time I'm finished every non gas pipe under the floor and in the loft will be insulated. I've even decided to insulate the main cold water supply pipe which runs in mid air about 10 metres through the crawl space from one side of the house to the other - if I'm going to do all these pipes I might as well be thorough then I can have peace of mind in the winter.
There is one air brick on each side of the house that vents the crawl space although on the night that I was doing the work it was relatively warm (10 degrees) and still in the crawl space. But I could see on a very windy cold night that it could get quite cold under there due to the vents so the insulation should prevent any wind chill effects on the pipes.
For the boiler I have a Drayton RTS3 that I'm going to install in the boiler closet to just fire the boiler to protect it. I'm not sure if I'll bother with the return pipe stat or not - as the boiler is in a small closet as soon as it is running it warms the closet right up so that should be enough to switch the 5 degree frost stat off again in a reasonable amount of time. Even on the coldest -6 degree nights we've had, the boiler closet has not gone below 18 degrees with the boiler running intermittently to maintain the bedroom temperature, and typically the room is about 25 degrees when the boiler is busy. If it was in a large room or garage then it would need a return flow stat to switch it off otherwise it would run continuously in a cold room as the waste heat from the boiler wouldn't warm a large room.
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