Is my heating broken or expensive.

eman66

I put a 1000L of oil in the tank second week in Oct. It ran out on Christmas morning. It's a four bedroom detached house, with a sitting room and open plan kitchen, living, dining area. All radiators have a 1 to 5 setting. The radiator in the sitting room has been turned off since Oct. In the kitchen/living/dining area there is 2 large and 2 small radiators. I tried level 3 first but wasn't happy with the warmth level so changed 3 of the radiators to 4, kept the one in the kitchen on 2. Bathrooms are on 1.

It's two-zone, upstairs and downstairs. The timer is set as follows:

6am - 8am both zones.
2pm - 4pm downstairs.
9pm - 10pm downstairs.

When the cold snap hit the heating was on constant for the evening.

When there was no heat on Christmas morning I thought a first that it was broken but checking the tank there is only about 2 inches left. Should it not empty completely? Would there be something wrong or is this how much it's going to cost me?

Joey the lips

I dont know to be honest., Whats your normal usage and what size is your boiler.

Additionally I suggest you fit an oil watchman. Cheap device that saves these problems.

c ashelmore

oil connections are always above the bottom of oil tank to minimize dirt being drawn into pipe.Probably nothing else wrong with system- just fill up and maybe bleed the pump.

items

eman66 wrote: »

I put a 1000L of oil in the tank second week in Oct. It ran out on Christmas morning. It's a four bedroom detached house, with a sitting room and open plan kitchen, living, dining area. All radiators have a 1 to 5 setting. The radiator in the sitting room has been turned off since Oct. In the kitchen/living/dining area there is 2 large and 2 small radiators. I tried level 3 first but wasn't happy with the warmth level so changed 3 of the radiators to 4, kept the one in the kitchen on 2. Bathrooms are on 1.

It's two-zone, upstairs and downstairs. The timer is set as follows:

6am - 8am both zones.
2pm - 4pm downstairs.
9pm - 10pm downstairs.

When the cold snap hit the heating was on constant for the evening.

When there was no heat on Christmas morning I thought a first that it was broken but checking the tank there is only about 2 inches left. Should it not empty completely? Would there be something wrong or is this how much it's going to cost me?

1000ltr, early to mid October used up by end of December, thats 1000ltr of oil in more or less two months. Sounds like your running heating at 5 to 6 hours everyday but its separated use over different zones. All in all 5 to 6 hours everyday over two months could be considered high usage.

Without knowing full details its hard to give advice, first thing I would look at is your house insulation, might be some concerns there, house not holding the heat? Next up is oil supplier.

I had a case where I was getting calls from a user suffering high usage of oil, many ltr usage, I couldn't find the problem tried everything. I was suspicious the user was not informing me correctly on how long boiler was being kept on. Un aware to home owner I fitted a timer to the boiler to record actual usage, so I had some solid proof.

Turns out the homeowner was close enough in stating actual use, when I worked out oil consumption based on use and the recorded oil level in tank at the time of timer fitting, something didn't add up, 1 either oil was being stolen from tank or 2, oil supplier was not filling the tank to levels charged for.

Its a strange one as I never found out which of the two it was, after I found out the possible causes, problem stopped.

Have you been getting more out of your oil in the past? Are you running boiler at same heating temp as before? Are you running boiler for the same length of time as before? Unless you've change some setting over the last few weeks their might just be some concerns over oil usage.

Might be a few clues in all that.

Best of luck.

sanj2408

Hi you might want to check for leaks. A friend of mine had the same problem, roughly the same sized house and it turned out the oil had leaked into the garden.

cormacl

My 2 cents.. look into TRVs on the rads, the boiler thermostat setting and a digital thermostat to replace the analogue one you may already have.

Last year, I got a gas bill for just a little over 200 Euro for 2 months.. and it appalled me. I think the period covered December and January which were very cold. I mentioned it to my dad who said he paid over 400 Euro on gas for more or less the same period. Now prices have obviously dropped etc since but it got me researching ways of reducing the usage.

After this, I got TRVs installed on all rads. Living areas are all set to the daylight ~20 deg, Bedrooms to ~15 deg and bathrooms to ~24. There's a 1-5 setting on each TRV for this kind of control.

I also got a digital thermostat to replace the crappy analog one I had. With the digital thermostat, you leave the existing timer permanently on, and the digital thermostat then uses its own timer to control the desired temperature for the given time and day of week.

In my case, after some learning, I've got it set to 31 deg from 6-7 (to force 1 hour of heating for hot water regardless of the actual ambient temperature of the room!). This means that on summer days, it won't cut out.

Then it switches to 21 deg for an hour and then to 19 degrees until 17:30 where it goes to 21 and stays there until 23:30 at 7 degrees. Weekends have 21 degrees used more than the 19 seting.

During holiday periods, I use a holiday mode that stays on 7 deg until a day before we come home. 7 degrees is often used as a base line for freeze protection. It means that the heating more or less will not come on at all unless the weather gets very very cold. And giving it a -1 period, means that it gets a whole day of normal heating before we return.

Then I reduced the boiler's own thermostat to 3.5 from a scale of 1-6.. it had been set to 5. I'm not sure exactly what its measurement is based on, whether its actually tracking temperature of the water loop or just timing itself, but it now has the boiler regularly cut out the burner whilst continuing to circulate water through the heating loop. It still delivers the good in terms of heating hot water for morning showers and driving the rads.

Comparing year on year usage in gas units, I've seen it drop to about 60% of the original usage. The house feels consistently warm without being too cold or too hot. There is a handy means of manually over-riding the setting to add a boost if things feel a little too cold.

I've installed the same thermostat for my elderly parents and now it does the rest for them. They dont have the TRVs aswell, but I did reduce their boiler thermostat to the same half-way mark. They are noticing the consistent heat and also seeing that on milder days, that the heating doesn't run as much.

So maybe a similar approach with the oil system is worth investigating.

eman66

Thanks all for the replies. Very helpful. I'll have to come back to this when things get back to something like normal. Hasn't been the most fantastic Christmas I've ever had, with no heat, no water and being snowed in. Today, slipped and slid my way down to the main road to get into the town, don't know if I'll risk going back tonight. The joys of country living

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eman66 wrote: »

Thanks all for the replies. Very helpful. I'll have to come back to this when things get back to something like normal. Hasn't been the most fantastic Christmas I've ever had, with no heat, no water and being snowed in. Today, slipped and slid my way down to the main road to get into the town, don't know if I'll risk going back tonight. The joys of country living

Sorry to hear, you must have got some good luck heading your way after all that.

A more basic version of Items advanced post:),

One tip i heard was to find the size of the nozzle, calculate the maximum oil the nozzle can pass in hour X hours used in a day X days since filling, this will tell you if you could physically use that amount of oil, obviously if you are losing more oil than the boiler can use in that time then that may help to point you in the right direction, Gary

eman66

Another 500ltrs used in 4 weeks.

After the first shock, I found a dial on the boiler without any label or description, I presume this was a temperature dial? It was at maximum so I turned it to half way. After this the radiators were not as hot. Also went around the house and set the radiators another point lower. I was also much more carefull this time with usage, to the point where the house was never really nice and warm.

We are in the house four months. It's never felt cosy, even before I started to watch the oil.

Time to get somebody to look at this.