Best Heating Practice

iniall

Apologies if this is a dumb question or the wrong place to ask it, but I'm trying to work out if there's general best practice for home heating. We've had a gas boiler for almost a year now. We've got three zones in the house, with Hive thermostats in each. There are rads in every room upstairs and in the hall and playroom downstairs, with underfloor heating in the kitchen and sitting room. Is it more efficient to set times for the heating to come on in each zone and boost when necessary or should we set a temperature for each zone and let the heating come on when needed to keep to that temperature?

Wearb

With the underfloor heating zone, it might be best to leave it on but with a setback temperature from say 1 hour before bedtime until a couple of hours before needed again. You'll have to experiment with this because it depends on the flow temperature through the underfloor floor area and the type of slab and insulation.

The areas with radiators will have a quicker response time, so you can have this coming on closer to the times needed.

In general, it's more economical to only heat when needed.

Now "needed" has different meanings for different people. There's "needed" to prevent your butt being frozen, or "needed" to have comfortable room temperatures, and all levels between those extremes.