RE: Re: Is it cheaper to leave your heating on?

["Dave McLaughlin" <dave_mclaughlin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For obvious reasons (outside temp is 25 to 35 all year round) I don't
have
home heating but I did switch my water heating from on all day to just once
per 24 hours and it reduced my costs by about 30%. I had a recording system
on the old apartment and I was able to confirm this by running the water
heating 24/7 and then switching to a once per day heat up.



As someone Tim pointed out below, good thermal insulation (for me is that
the ambient temperature in the room where the water tank is located is
never
below 29 deg C) will reduce the thermal temperature drop and therefore the
amount of energy needed to boost the temperature back up to what it was set
for.



For me, we only have hot water in the toilets (yip, no hot water in the
kitchen over here) and with only 2 of us, a 2 hour heat in the morning is
enough for hot water all day and at a much lower running cost. Electricity
is not cheap here and you pay a higher tariff for a bigger installed
capacity. I also dropped my costs per month just dropping my capacity from
6.5kW to 5.5kW which saved me another 30%. Is super crazy how they work out
things here!!!



Dave.



From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Howard
Sent: 28 February 2013 16:04
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] Re: Is it cheaper to leave your heating on?





But even with the best insulation available, it surely has to require more
energy to keep something at a constant temperature than to let it cool down
and warm up again? It might not be much more, but it has to be more,
doesn't
it?

I was hoping someone on here would have recorded their energy use and tried
different regimes. Looks like I might have to do it myself, curiosity is
getting the better of me...

--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx <mailto:ukha_d%40yahoogroups.com>
, Tim Hawes
wrote:
>
> I don't think it's quite as clear cut as that and, as usual, the
answer
is,
> "it depends".
> It depends on:
> - the level of insulation (walls, doors, windows, roof & floor)
> - a degree of air-tightness (draughtproofing)
> - the type of building construction (lightweight e.g. timber frame or
> heavy-weight / high thermal mass)
> - the length of time the house is unoccupied
> - the type of heating system you have (radiators, underfloor heating
> buried in screed, hot air system, etc.) as this will affect the
warm-up
time
>
> Taking an example to extremes, it will be very costly to keep a
draughty,
> uninsulated shed warm throughout the day however a well-insulated, air
> tight building will fare much much better. Furthermore, with the well
> insulated house, even though the heating is "on" at the
timeclock, the
> better thermal performance will mean that when heat is called for it
won't
> need to be delivered for as long.
>
> HTH,
> Tim.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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