Use cases for 'no optimisation' - please post

[Rameses]

Hello

I want to capture your use cases for (or thinking to) not needing optimisation / learning

Please post

[chrisgare]

Simple really. I have no need to to get the house up to temperature at a specific time so I do not used optimised start. I work from home but the heating gets my office up to temperature before 09:00 anyway. I'm quite happy to have the heating turn off at 22:00 as I never felt it would have a big impact on gas bills. If I saw a real benefit in my situation I'd use it. I've had Evohome since the b/w version was released and I've used this way of working since then. Chris

[paulockenden]

From my point of view, I think the only reason to turn start or end optimisation off is when it isn't working properly in a particular zone.

Given the fact that this is bound to happen (learning has limits, and extreme zones will break it) I think it's sensible to be able to switch it off on a zone by zone basis, like we used to be able to.

P.

[bruce_miranda]

What Paul said. Continue to have the optimization but make it per zone selectable. By forcing a user to have it operate on all zones makes people like me to Turn it off altogether.

[DBMandrake]

Hello

I want to capture your use cases for (or thinking to) not needing optimisation / learning

Please post

Although I generally find optimal start works well for me (and therefore have it enabled) I've found optimal stop to not be desirable in more than one zone, and have had to turn it off house wide as I can't turn it off on individual zones.

A good example is any room with other sources of heat that may push the room temporarily over target - this is misinterpreted by optimal stop. For example in a bathroom where it is scheduled to be 22 degrees in the morning, as soon as the shower goes on and the room starts warming up further from another heat source optimal stop will calculate that it can turn the zone off (as much as 30-60 minutes early!) and it will be able to "coast" down to half a degree below the set point before the end of the scheduled on time.

However optimal stop is based on an assumption that the prevailing conditions will remain and that there are no other temporary heat sources, but it doesn't and can't know that the shower will be turned off again shortly and the window will be opened - now the room will get cold and towels won't dry because it turned the zone off perhaps 30-60 minutes early. For this one zone alone I can't use optimal stop. A kitchen is another example of a zone where temporary external heat will fool optimal stop into acting extremely early.

Because of these kind of issues I turn optimal stop off, however there are lesser used rooms that don't have other sources of heat where I could use optimal stop to my advantage.

[G4RHL]

I gave up using it because it always came on far too soon and shut off too soon. I had let it run for several months for it to learn but it never really did. I would have thought it is easier, and perhaps more economical, that if you want your heating at a certain temperature by a certain time, then you soon learn how long it takes and adjust the switch on time. If I had wanted that it would have been a much easier solution for me. I just leave it to come on the time I want knowing the chill is off whatever room it comes on in within a few minutes. To be honest I felt it was a wasted feature.

[gordonb3]

Never used it. My livingroom (under) heating system is way too slow for any anticipating algorithm to be able to work with it. The other rooms require a sort of ad-hoc heating and in fact the heaters in those rooms will usually do so in less than five minutes. I'm really mostly hindered by the limit that exists on being able to open the main valve, meaning that if that thing just closed when I trigger a heat demand I cannot get any for at least five minutes (ten in the default setting). Which I suppose makes sense if you're after saving startup costs for firing a boiler, but I'm on city block heating so I do not have to consider such costs. The thing here is that in winter I do tend to fire up the children's bedrooms for five minutes to take the chill out just before they go to bed and it took me a while to figure out why sometimes this would not work. The problem of course being that when the main valve finally opens the radiator valves may have already reached their 'until' time and closed and so no heat ever flows into the radiator.

[MrB]

I switched it on to start with, but then after months of watching it (via own software and now Domiticz) I switched it off.
Reason being that different rooms have 'strange' characteristics and regularly get temp overruns. Think is caused by irregular air movement via open doors and heat escaping between rooms. Learning never seem to improve things so assumed it was chasing it's tail.
Ditto with switch off - it works on what historical (aka learning) as opposed to what is actually happening. Guess even software can't predict the future :-)

For some rooms it worked, but not all. So off it went.

I agree with poster above that a per zone setting would be a better option.

[rcopus]

Where you want to control towel radiators.

[Dan_Robinson]

My brother has disabled his because of creaking pipe work in his nearly 500 year old house.

The rooms heat up quickly enough when the system runs so he just sets it up to turn on 10 minutes before actually getting out of bed.

[bruce_miranda]

Where you want to control towel radiators.

Infact I installed my towel rails without any TRVs. That way they warm up even in the summer when the HW cycle comes on. Best way to dry the towels all year round.

[DBMandrake]

Infact I installed my towel rails without any TRVs. That way they warm up even in the summer when the HW cycle comes on. Best way to dry the towels all year round.

I can't stand having the bathroom radiator going when unneeded.

My approach is that when the bathroom is likely to be needed (weekday mornings etc) it is scheduled to 20, (which may or may not make the radiator come on depending on the time of the year and ambient conditions) but when someone uses the bathroom for a shower or bath and towels are used I manually turn the radiator up a few degrees (typically to about 24) just before using the shower or bath, and set the timed override to end about 30 minutes after the room will be vacated, including having it run for about 30 minutes after we leave the house on a weekday morning. This seems to be more than sufficient to dry the towels and the room without having it come on any time heating is used elsewhere.

Also remember if you have an S-Plan system with only a hot water zone valve as is often recommended on here, your towel rails will still get hot when the system is re-heating hot water in the summer, and if your boiler applies a flow temperature boost for hot water they may get very hot indeed. Personally I'm not in favour of any radiators in the house heating just because there is a hot water demand. It seems quite wasteful.

[rcopus]

Infact I installed my towel rails without any TRVs. That way they warm up even in the summer when the HW cycle comes on. Best way to dry the towels all year round.

That’s great but doesn’t help people with combi boilers or heating systems designed not to pump hot water around a heating circuit instead of just heating the tank.