My personal experiance in setting up boiler for most efficient fuel consuption

[matt-lmr]

We recently moved into a large fairly old 4 bedroom detached house in the Scottish Highlands, the house has a new Worcester bosch boiler and a separate programmer plus room thermostat and all radiators have tvr valves.

In the first year of living here i knew nothing about the best/most cost effective way to set up all these controls.
After some very expensive gas bills i decided to do lots of research but i wont bore you with the details, basically i came up with the following settings that have slashed our fuel cost in half!

We set all the radiator thermostat valves to max/5 the room thermostat is set to 18degrees and the boiler water temp control is set to 2, it goes from *123456 and max.
The programmer is set to turn the boiler on at 5am as we get up at around 6am it then stays on all day until 10pm we go to bed at 10.30pm

In this configuration the entire house is gently warmed to our comfort setting of about 17degrees, the room thermostat doesn't ever actually click of the burner as the temp never reaches the 18degrees its set it, this is because of the silly low boiler water temp setting of 2, by doing it this way the return temp is very low and the boiler is condensing alot of the time.

How do you know if your boilers working in condensing mode? well i have found out that, with our room thermostat it is a digital one that shows the room temp aswell as the set temp and most importantly it has a symbol that shows when its firing the burner.
as certain times you can look at the room stat see that it should be firing the burner but if you go look at the boiler the burner light is not on but the boiler is making a quite noise.
Also with the lower boiler setting of 2 there is now alot less steam coming out the flu compared to when it used to be set on 5 or 6.

In this setup our lpg gas bill is half what it used to be!!

Now i know this might not be of any help of interest to some as most people prefer to have there house at around 19 to 21 degrees.
But if your like us and are happy with 17 this setup will save you a ton of money! 17degrees is still a lot warmer than outside lol
Peace Matt.

[mindmapper1]

Hi this is interesting and useful. I too have been looking at the most efficient use of the combi boiler which is new in our house. With the help of my Owl Intuition I can view a graph which shows the outside temp, when the boiler is programmed to come on and what temperature to maintain. I can see when the boiler cuts in and the temperature that the house is 'at' at any point in time via my computer or the smart phone app. Within in 24 hrs of having the system installed I could see that there were times when the boiler was programmed for too short a time and thus the energy being used was not being used effectively. So by altering the length of time to be on, or off, I could optimize the cool down time and maximise the use of the heat.
I was also able to see that the boiler fired up at other times which were not programmed to maintain the background temperature. By changing this set point I could save energy from wasted firings.
The other really useful thing is that if we are going to home later than planned or earlier than planned the heating can be controlled remotely, equally if it drops cold or warms up we can adjust the heating remotely.
Ultimately we have a warmer house for much less money spent on heating! Happy days.

[chris_j_hunter]

in our previous house, the gas boiler was always going on & off, which we were sure was an inefficient way to work - so our plan was to go for one with a modulating burner, when the time came to replace (we moved before that happened, though) ...

some years before, we'd been in a house with solid-fuel heating from a back-boiler - initially it was unable to keep the house warm, however much fuel we fed it ... solution was simple, though - ie: we turned all the radiators off (bar the bathroom one), let them cool, then cracked them open, quarter-turn, waited, felt how warm, opened another quarter-turn if needed, and further quarter-turns if needed ... most that any was open was four quarters, most were left at one or two ... then all was fine, house was warm, fire could cope ...

over the following weeks, depending on how each room felt, we adjusted up or down in quarter-turns (much depends on radiator size vs room size) ...

anyway, corollary of this is, do the same for minimum fuel-burn ... which we did, in our previous house ...

NB: the solid fuel back boiler & circulation pump was on all the time - ie: no on/off, 'though the fire could be manually adjusted ...