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Options for smart heating controls with gravity fed, non motorised hot water valve?

  • 23-09-2024 8:51am
    #1
    guitarless
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 29 ✭


    I got a combi boiler installed recently but to save costs it was installed as a "conventional" setup. It's still gravity fed by my water tank in the attic, and I have a hot water tank and a manual valve to just heat the water tank (for summer), or heat the radiators + hot water tank. There is no thermostat on the water tank or for the heating.

    I want to replace my old timer style controls with a local-controller smart heating system like Tado or Drayton. However they say they're not compatible with gravity fed systems. I think they rely on having motorised valves for the hot water tank, and pumped systems.

    From Drayton:

    Wiser is not compatible with traditional gravity-fed systems, because this type of system normally lacks water cylinder thermostats, motorised valves and external temperature controls, resulting in very limited thermostatic control which Wiser needs in order to work.

    I'm not too sure why this is necessary. Can I still just install a smart thermostat based system that will control boiler on/off based on temperature or manual control through an app? If I don't need separate hot water thermostats or advanced controls. Right now it seems like the timer is a binary on/off for the boiler and whatever I replace it with will also do this.

    Are there any smart heating controls that will work for this simple setup?



Comments

  • #2
    10-10-20
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 8,074 ✭✭✭10-10-20


    Hi. You're describing a very old setup with no thermostat, I didn't even know that those existed these days to be honest. Not having a thermostat on the system heating makes it into what's called an "open loop" system and you can't have any control on such as system as there isn't a control device (motorised valve). At a minimum you could install some stand-alone TRV's on the rads, but the issue is that the boiler would need a pressure bypass fitted as there is a good chance that all of the TRV's could close off at the same time and the boiler pressure will increase, causing issues.

    Honestly, I'd look into getting a thermostat and valve fitted in place of the mechanical valve. If the boiler and cylinder are close enough to each other then it will just need to be wired up to a smart controller with a wireless thermostat then placed into the living area.



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