I concur too.
I hope that if you do carry out your threat to post a 'review' all over social media you'll point to this thread, and mention that the majority of other Evohome users seem not to be as bothered by the noise as you are.
The large majority I think Paul... The clanking of my 15mm copper piping when heating up is much louder than the HR92s. It's been quite warm at night in the last few days and the three radiators in my bedroom have not been coming on at 07:00. My half-asleep reaction was that I worried whether the heating had come on at all and I had to go out onto the landing to take a look!
Not yet. I may do that at some point, but I really don't think it's an issue with different batches of HR92s.Originally Posted by Sentry1
I wouldn't call myself noise obsessive. I did spend, frankly, a ridiculous amount of time and money recently on a new cooker hood for our kitchen. We had put up with a very noisy hood for many years and it was something I was determined to change when we renewed our kitchen last year. I ordered a custom made hood, with remote fan unit and all the additional building work that entailed, only to find the noise was hardly any different! The thing was though that I knew it could be quieter. So that led me to spend more money first relocating the motor and eventually swapping it out for a different type with additional ducting etc. etc. Inthe end, I've got my quiet cooker hood and I'm glad I persevered.
I'm sure we would have lived with the noisier one if there hadn't had been a way to make it quieter, but I knew I could make it quieter and took it on as a sort of challenge to my determination and ingenuity.
So I wouldn't criticise Evohome for being too noisy. As I said earlier in the thread, I realise they have to build the components to a cost. Yes, the HR92 could have been designed to be quieter by making the body out of a different material. Maybe someone really clever with a 3D printer could have a go at redesigning it and printing a few test housings? Go on, you know you want to...
No, the real reason I'm playing around with noise meters and valves is because I think maybe I might find a way to make them quieter and that's a little challenge for me. I might not get anywhere with it, but it's worth a try I think.
I'm going to take my noise meter to my mum's this week and see if her actuators really are much quieter than mine first, just in case I was convincing myself otherwise before.
The other experiment I considered was getting hold of an old radiator and pipes and assembling a test rig to enable me to swap valves and test different actuators much more easily than I can do now.
I'm not obsessed. Honest!
I'd still like to see someone who thinks their system is noisy do an experiment where they wedge a towel or something TIGHTLY down the back of a radiator, and do something similar to brace the pipe that feeds the HR92. Just to eliminate resonance effects amplifying the noise.
P.
Indeed. A radiator is a great big sounding board for any vibration that is mechanically passed to it.
Case in point, our new bathroom radiator is an 800x600 double panel single convector (type 21) that is fed via 8mm microbore. As the original radiator install was archaic single end feed (both pipes entering on the left) the feed for the right now comes up by the left of the radiator, passes behind it then bends in a loop in the bottom right corner to enter the radiator.
I had noticed that when I balanced the radiator that there was a rather loud "hiss" that could be heard any time the radiator was running - a lot more than you'd expect from the lockshield valve. I noticed that if I touched the loop of 8mm copper where it came out of the radiator and around the back it quietened it right down. I then realised that the pipe was actually touching the back of the radiator where it passed behind it. I bent the pipe slightly so that it was no longer touching - noise gone. Or at least back down to a normal amount of hiss.
The noise of the water rushing through the 8mm copper pipe was being directly transmitted to the back of the radiator panel through physical contact, which was then acting like a large speaker / sounding board...
Last edited by DBMandrake; 12th December 2016 at 01:00 PM.
I did that yesterday but it didn't make much difference. I was testing on a 1200 double rad and I think the thin vanes between the two panels might be the biggest culprit rather than the panels themselves. Either way, to me, the majority of the noise seems to be radiated from the body of the HR92.
A low-tech way to narrow down a noise source is to stick a length of rubber tube in your ear and move the other end around until you hear the loudest noise.
Here are some numbers for those interested.
The noise was measured with a Type 2 meter (accurate to + or - 1dB) set to dBA weighting, fast response, low scale and positioned on the same level as the HR92 and 0.5m from the LCD display.
If you are going to use a phone app to compare readings, you should measure in the same way and at the same distance and bear in mind you may not get comparable results. Instead, you should concentrate on the relative readings you get when trying different HR92s, valves, coverings etc.
1. Background noise level (quiet room, no traffic noise) - 34.6 dBA
2. HR92 not fitted to valve (peak reading during 3 opening and closing cycles) - 35.1 dBA
3. HR92 fitted to unbranded valve. Between 4 HR92s I saw a peak of between 38.4 and 39.6 dBA during 3 opening/closing cycles, so quite a variation between different HR92s.
4. HR92 covered in sound-deadening foam around the back of its body - 36.3dBA
5. HR92 uncovered fitted to Honeywell Valencia valve - 38.2dBA
Waking up this morning and hearing the actuator, I have to say that I do think the same HR92 fitted to the Valencia valve is actually a bit quieter and these readings bear that out.
I'm going to take one of my HR92s to my mum's house later this week and compare it with one of her's on the Travis Perkins valves she has fitted. I think that's going to show if there really is a big gain to be had from using different valves and it will prove whether different batches of HR92 makes a difference.
I think there is a lot of truth in you statement,not that I ever thought that my Evohome was noisy, in fact the opposite, I was following this post, and wondered what it was all about.
I knocked all my rads down to 5C, then went round the house with my iPhone and raised the setting to 20C on each unit and listened interestingly the only one making more noise than any of the others was a one on a twin rad.
While my units are HR80UK and not HR92 the relevance is that inorder to be able to read the screen, the battery boxes on these units were jammed tight against the wall, therefore damping any sound from all units with exception of the one on the twin rad
I had previously thought that HR80s made more noise than HR92. Prior to this I was not aware the sound I was hearing was from only one unit.
The sound from this unit can only be heard when the house is quiet, no fridge or freezer etc running
As a difference of 3dBA is barely perceptible to the human ear, then Im struggling to see how these can in any way be described as "noisy". Background noise at 34.6 and the level with an uncovered HR92 on a valve is just 3.6dBA higher.. and still below 40dBA.
Sitting in absolute silence in a room, yes you can hear the valves operating, but I would hardly consider them noisy. If the TV or radio is on, or the kids are playing, or the cooker is running, or the bathroom extractor, then you simply cant hear them. Almost any other noise generated in a house is louder than these valves imho, and life is simply too short to worry about making motorised radiator valves silent.
As I said right at the start, I suspect it's mainly psychological.
Once a noise starts to annoy you you can't help hearing it. Your brain seems to filter it out from all of the other noises around, and bring it to the centre of your attention.
It doesn't even need to be annoying. How many of us in the "the noise is acceptable" camp have started to hear our HR92s more since this thread started? I know I have.
Not to the point where they become annoying though.
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