Getting most out of your heating system. New Tado device.

Msn9000

Getting most out of your heating system. New Tado device.

I was inspired to write this article after reading “Add max. valve opening on thermostats!!” by cjp https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/14775/add-max-valve-opening-on-thermostats

I have been working on these issues for hours and days. Optimizing my heating system as good as I can. In this text I’m going to explain how I solved this I my case. I will also come with suggestions to alternative solutions and finally. I will come with a suggestion to how Tado could “fix” this with a smart and even more green solution.

Bear in mind. Each house and heating system is different. There is a number of factors that could change it all. If you have ground heat (Danish: Jordvarme) or heat pump (Danish: Varmepumpe) the numbers I am going to use later, will be much different. I would recommend calling a professional if not know what you are doing.

Starting with some info on my heating setup. I live in Denmark. I have 3 bedrooms with 1 radiator in each. I also have a kitchen / Livingroom with 2 radiators connected to one thermostat on the wall.

My setup is a typical Danish setup. We use something called district heating (Danish: Fjernvarme) where all houses in a town uses the same boiler or other heating source. In general. There is hot water getting in the house using a pipe and return water getting out. There is a meter on the hot water which measures Watt, waterflow and temperature. There is also a probe measuring temperature on return water. It´s used to calculate the difference between incoming and outgoing water. In Denmark it is quite normal to charge the heat using watt. But also, to get a discount or pay more depending on your ability to take advantage of the heat. They do this to make us optimize our heating setup. There are many good reasons for that.

In my case the incoming water is about 75⁰ Celsius and returning water is 26⁰ Celsius. That means take I take 49⁰ Celsius out of the water. The normal is about 40⁰ Celsius. It means that I get a very good discount. Before I made the explained optimizations, I was at the normal of 40⁰ Celsius or worse. The main reason was too fast waterflow through some radiators. That did not only make me pay more because of the too hot return water. But I did also pay for extra wattages because there was too much flow through the system.

The solution. I changed the valves on each radiator to a valve where you can adjust waterflow. In my case a low flow valve. (It is possible that, you already have valves that can be adjusted) I also limited the general flow for all radiators. The reason I have limited the flow in general is to make the system less noisy. But also to allow a lower flow.

To the adjust the valves in the radiator I did the following in kitchen and living room.

Take off the Tado thermostat of the radiator. Set the valve flow to the middle position. The radiator should be able to run without the thermostat for about 30 minutes without the return water is getting hot. (You shod be able to hold the return pipe in you hand) In my case I use a thermometer. If the return water is to hot after 30 minutes then adjust valve to less flow and try again. Remember to wait for the radiator is back to room temperature.

In my bedrooms where the temperature is lower in general, I had some problems with cold draft from the windows. To help solve that, I made the flow super low. Forcing the Tado thermostat to be open more often. Resulting in, it being a bit hot all the time. Making shot air which reduce cold air draft from windows.

It is possible to adjust the system quite well using the general valve for all radiators without the use of induvial valves. But if you have different needs or sized radiators it could be even better with individual valves.

It is possible that some also have returning valves on each radiator. These can be used to change max flow  instead of changing the intake valves.

I would recommend optimizing the heat system in heat season.

If you limit the waterflow too much. Then you can not heat up the room.

Yes. I would also like the option to limit flow in the Tado thermometer.

Suggestion to Tado. Develop a clamp on thermometer for the return pipes of the radiator. Using this data you could notify the user, if the radiator is should be adjusted (or changed in size). You could alto optimize the heating pattern and turning off a thermostat when water gets too hot. It could also notify user if the radiator is heating when the thermostat is off. I have tried this many times when the kids had pulled off the thermostat. There are many scenarios where this thermometer could benefit.

You could make a version of the clamp on thermometer with built in flowmeter for system adjusting purposes. (I think this would be expensive, but cool)

To make the clamp on thermometer work you need to know the intake temperature. That could be a setting in the software where the user set it up. But the temperature could change some degrees all the time depending on system. Solving this could also be a clamp on thermometer or getting data directly from the heating system. I my case I have a Kamstrup Multical 403 heat and flow meter. It is possible to read data from it through an optical reader. Sending data directly to Tado.

 

Any comments? I would like to hear about your optimizing. How much heat are you pulling out of your system?

 

Best regards

Morten

Fluffyman

Any response from Tado yet ? I believe this feature could be solving a lot of problems for myself as well.

After changing to Tado, our usage is down 20% - but the return temperature is now 37,5 degrees (30,1 before) which will cause a penalty on the annual balancing invoice.