In my old flat, I only had Thermostatic Radiator Valves in which the numbers 1-5 equalled a range of temperatures and the radiators would heat each room to the respective temperature the valve was set to – meaning each room was individually controlled. In my current flat I have a boiler, thermostat in one room, and radiators in each room which all have thermostatic radiator valves. As I have gathered, the thermostat takes the reading from the room it is located in and the radiator in this room must be kept on (at 5 preferably) at all times, otherwise the thermostat will think the room never reaches the desired temperature and the boiler will never switch off. The thermostat works off of the ambient temperature in the room it is located in but then how to the individual thermostatic radiator valves play into this?
For example: If the thermostat is set for 20 degrees and the boiler is still on as it works to reach 20 degrees but another room is set to 18 degrees and 18 degrees has been reached in this room I assume in this instance the radiator valve just closes? But Let’s say I set the thermostat to 18 Degrees Celsius, and the room the thermostat is located in reaches 18 degrees, the boiler will then turn off. So what then happens to the other room if the radiator is set to 20 degrees but the room has not yet reached 20 degrees as now the boiler has turned off?
In: 1
The two work independently of each other.
Boiler: A water heating boiler maintains a set water temperature, (usually around 180*F), to be pumped into the radiators. It uses it’s own thermostat switch to turn the boiler on and off as the water temperature of the boiler fluctuates.
Thermostatic radiator valve: It will adjust the hot water flow into the radiator according to the desired room temperature it is set at. Less water flow/less radiating heat, and of course the opposite.
> …a boiler, thermostat in one room, and radiators in each room which all have thermostatic radiator valves.
Ah, ok. Apology for not reading this earlier. The application I described are set up with commercial systems, (non-residential), that I have worked on. Which that no radiators or room T-stats have any influence upon the boiler maintaining it’s own set temperature.
Sorry can’t help you more with this. Other than to say that one T-stat turning off the boiler, (*if* that is its single function?), it then overrides all other’s temp settings.
If the central boiler is turned off then no heat gets delivered to any of your radiators, regardless of the setting on your thermostatic radiator valves. So in your specific scenario, if the thermostat is set to 18, and the room its in is at 18, then indeed the boiler will turn off and your other room will not heat any further, even if you set its radiator valve to 20 degrees (of course, it’s possible that your other room heats up faster, and had already reached 20).
Thermostatic radiator valves are mainly useful in rooms that tend to get too hot when they are controlled by the central thermostat alone. That way, those radiators can be switched off earlier once those rooms have reached the desired temperature, while the rest of the house can keep heating a bit longer.
The other way around doesn’t work: if you place thermostatic radiator valves in areas that tend to lag behind the temperature of the “thermostat room”, those valves will just end up being open all the time (since it’s always colder than you want), and will do nothing to keep heating a room while the boiler has already switched off.
In principle you can solve this by placing the thermostat in the coldest room in your house, so that your boiler is on whenever heating is needed anywhere. However that may be overdoing things a bit as keeping the boiler on requires energy (on top of the energy lost to heating rooms), and so if it’s very often on just to heat a single room, that’s a bit of a waste and you may be better off trying to add more heating or insulation to that specific room.
(The above is all assuming that you want similar temperatures throughout your house. If you want different temperatures then that’s a different story, of course. E.g. maybe you have a fitness room that you want at 17 degrees while your central thermostat is set to 20. In that case a thermostatic radiator valve can still be useful, even if the fitness room already tends to be colder than the room with the thermostat.)
Latest Answers