Slow warm up

colo alex

So I have hot water baseboard heating, 4 zones. I have always set the thermostat to the desired temperature and just left it alone. This year I decided to put on programmable thermostats to hopefully cut some of the heating costs. I have them set to drop the temp to 62 when we are gone and 70 when we are home. The problem is that it takes several hours to go from 62 to 70 degrees.

Is that normal? If so, is it more efficient to just leave the temp alone? Or is there maybe a problem with my system?

It is 12 years old and has always worked fine.

Any help would be great. Thanks,

Alex

colo alex

Bump

antoinolachtnai

It takes a lot of energy to heat up a house by 8F. I'd imagine your heating just doesn't have near enough output. I'd say that's quite typical for a central heating system. I have a graph of temp from my system here, and it takes about 1.5 hours to raise the temperature by 1.5 C in the hall (though other parts of the house heat faster). Additionally, as you make the house hotter, the house will lose heat faster and faster, and the system will struggle just to keep up.

Some thermostats have a 'learning' function and know how long the heat needs to be on to get the room to the target temperature. These are normally fitted to UFH systems rather than your sort of system.

I would suggest you could set it up to begin heating the house up a few hours before you arrive home? Could that work? You will save a fair amount of fuel if you can cut the temperature down for parts of the day.

colo alex

It is not a problem to set the program to turn the heat on earlier but I’m wondering if it takes more energy to bring the temp back up those 8 degrees or is it more efficient just to leave the temp at a steady 70 and never change it?

antoinolachtnai

In my opinion, and all other things being equal, it would be cheaper to turn it off for a while each day.

But the best way to find out for sure is to try. If you are on gas, you can keep an eye on how much is used.