Winter 2025/26 - General Discussion

Went for a walk at 8ish last night and it was an exceptional starry night with no moon. I noticed some small patches of the road were starting to ice up even though it felt well above freezing. At 8am this morning they were lethal. Everyone has improved their ice driving skills over the past couple of weeks!

Ah thanks!☺️ I fear my TLDR waffle posts often bore people. Like for instance, I mentioned my 'infamous' Cross Climate Tyres in quotes because after my longish post in the event thread a few users there who thought there was no need for Kermits thread scoffed at my even mentioning Snow rated tyres. ie. they reckoned this spell would amount to nothing for most people in terms of snow and here was this eejit talking about the need for All Season Snow Rated Tyres. Whereas if my post hadn't triggered a TLDR response, they might have read it properly and not have misinterpretted it and realised I was actually kind of agreeing with them that this spell would likely amount to nothing for most and that I bought the tyres last year to feel safer driving up the Wicklow Mountains right on my doorstep to get my Snow Fix rather than relying on the rare Snow falls on Bray Seafront.

So to conclude the Spoiler tagged 'waffle' above that most wont want to read and otherwise have to scroll past, The Hive was a great investment as it allowed me to see how the house was performing, allowed me to tweak Schedules and temps and then see the results of my tweaks, to the point where we found a great compromise between comfort and gas consumption. It was shocking to realise how much consumption dropped by dropping the Thermostats down one degree and then another without overly affecting comfort. At worst it just meant people kept there jumpers on at 19c instead of stripping down to t-shirts when they started to sweat a bit at 21c.

Similar setup here.

Most of my rads have manual (As oppsed to WIFI) Thermostatic valves set to 21c in lived in rooms where the rad in that room shuts off if the room gets above 21c no matter what temp the Hive Thermostats are set to. Un-used rooms have the door closed and the Rad Thermostatic valve set to * Frost Protection. My Hive controls 3 Zones with electronic Zone Valves. Downstairs, Upstairs and hot Water. The hot Water cylinder thermostat is set to 62c and the Hive is set to turn boiler on for 2 hours in the morning and 2 in the evening if the Cylinder is below 62c. We've family members in the house all day. At no point is the house ever empty with everyone in work etc, so we have the heating zones set to be active from 7am till 10pm with a target temp of 19c Downstairs and 17c upstairs. During that 15 hour window the boiler is only firing as long as it needs to maintain the temp of those zones close to 19c/17c. During this spell with outside temps of 2-5c that meant 5 or 6 hours, however when the external temps are in the 8-10c range it was only firing for 2-3 hours during that 15 hour schedule window. When I had the Target temp set at 21c (which meant T-shirts tbh) the boiler was firing for 13 or 14 of that 15 hour schedule Window. So effectively, dropping the Target temp from 21-20c cut consumption in half and from 20-19c cut it nearly in half again…and all it meant was we had to keep our jumpers on.

Same in Bray near the Seafront. Hardest Frost of this entire spell here this morning. I presume that was down to higher humidity levels rather than lower temps. Even at 9:30am the cars outside were white on the sides nevermind the roof, windscreen and bonnets and the astroturf lawn bowling green was completely white like as if it had a few cm of snow on it.

Normal winter weather is back. This is the most rain I have seen in a long time. I hope we don't get punished for all the dry weather. I was walking along a riverbank this morning and it was at mid summer levels.

Ah lads its not that bad out! It's very mild and just drizzly rain really in Dublin.

Now it was absoutlely lashing this morning but we have been out and about since no problem.

My 3 year old had sore hands from the cold this week( even though he had gloves on) so I can see the positive in milder weather even if wet!