Re: New paradigm for home heating automation and control

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Pat Farrell" <pfarrell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

<stuff snipped>

> Not heating a room that isn't used saves energy.
> No argument there. The challenge is that most people
> use lots of rooms, some one regular schedules (dinning room
> at meal time) and others at very irregular schedules.

It's something that really has to be planned for.  This year, we shut off
the attic, the basement and a spare bedroom.  The living quarters stay warm
but the unheated areas drop to around 50-60F.  It makes doing the laundry or
working in the workshop chilly, but it saves a lot of money only heating 1/3
of the house.

> A underheated (or overheated) room has not only the
> air to heat, but also all the furnishing, floor, walls, etc.
> Getting all of it up to temperature quickly is not easy.
> Oversizing the furnace, ducts, fans, etc. is not a clear
> winner.

There are lots of psychological issues here, too.  I've found that it's best
to keep the bathroom the warmest, the bedroom the second warmest, the
kitchen third and the living room fourth.  That's based on the fact that
even a dog doesn't like it's butt touching something cold - maybe a heated
toilet seat means we could shave a few more $ off the heating bill.  The
bedroom can be kept pretty cold if the bed is kept warm with an electric
blanket.  Again, the "dog's butt" theory comes into play.  No one likes to
crawl into an icy bed!

> What you want is enough sensors to know what rooms
> you will be using, and get them conditioned before you
> get there.

There should be some pretty automatic ways of doing that, too.  When the
house senses you're approaching in your car it should begin the warmup.  :-)
While it's simple to zone resistance heating (what I'm doing now) the
problem would be more complex with gas.  As Mr. Burgess noted, to really
warm up a place requires quite a BTU blast - one that would be unacceptable
in normal use.

> Not an easy problem.

Amen!

--
Bobby G.