Making a move
I’ve talked a great deal about how our heating works. In line with what I’ve been talking about the past few months, I thought I’d share our latest adventure.
Adventure, is that over cooking it a little!?
It might not be a terribly exciting adventure for many but it certainly burned up some energy.
We had an offer from our energy company to buy a wired thermostat and given 5 such devices in our house (every room downstairs has individual room thermostats and the upstairs hallway), I was keen to take them up on their offer. Only they were out of stock…
Okaaaaay…
However, this time of year is good in terms of pricing for heating system upgrades, so I bought directly from tado themselves and although it arrived last week, today was installation day.
Our boiler is on a separate fuse, I’d read and watched several instruction blogs and youtubes and felt pretty good about what I was doing and having put it on inside out (which made it incrediably fiddly), I got to the point where I switched on.
All looked good so I tried to get it to heat and killed a fuse somewhere in the system. Oh dear, or words to that effect.
We found the fuse in question, found a 5A replacement, took the thermostat out of circuit and checked everything was working. Phew, or words to that effect.
Of course, being a German system, once you have it talking to the internet, it is really helpful about telling you have it should be working and it seemed obvious from the much more detailed “replacement instructions” for our old thermostat, where different wires should go.
Did that, switched on again, all work, so again tested the heating. Bliss!
Out of interest, why bother?
Good question. I did replace one of the internet controlled systems with this new one, so on the surface of it, might not have seemed worth the effort.
First one
Is always the hardest, and took 90 minutes. Having done it, I’ll work through the remainder of the thermostats, one a month, until they are all done.
Newer system
Don’t get me wrong, our 2011 Heatmiser thermostats did their job but we’re living different lives and starting to travel a lot more. I couldn’t get the old PRT-Wifi for the non-internet sockets we had, so we were going to have to start upgrading at some point.
Having been impressed with the tado smart radiator valves, it made sense to stick with that company and a single interface. With this new zone thermostat, we now have 8 devices and will be putting a smart radiator valve on our new radiator in the ensuite.
While nothing lasts for every, the device I’ve chosen is their latest and greatest and when we swap out our current boiler, it should be compatiable with whatever we get to replace it.
Will the job ever be done?
That’s an interesting question. I don’t believe it is possible to get our house to an EPC grade A without completely replacing the boiler with an electric heating system and even then, I think that might be close but no cigar. We’re not 100% passive, we’re very good but completely passive is a different story.
That final step is unlikely to be cheap. We’re not keen on an air source system as we have too much space to cater for, and ground source systems are very efficient but much more expensive to install.
Who knows though. The future is not set quite yet.
Posted: March 20th, 2022 under Driving off the grid.