Heating control advice

[StephenR]

I have recently moved into a new house and am finding a few issues with controlling the temperature in each room. I find that despite my fiddling with the TRVs on the radiators some rooms stay much cooler than the rest, particularly the top floor bedroom as the house is three stories. There is a single thermostat in the hall, and I think what tends to happen is the thermostat will switch off the heating because it has reached the desired temperature but the top room will still be too cold.

In order to resolve this problem I have thought about installing more intelligent TRVs on the radiators, perhaps something like the Hometronic system. If I understand correctly, I think this should ensure the heating stays on until each room has reached the correct temperature. I would be interested to hear from someone who has experience with these types of systems as to whether they think this would be a good way to resolve the issues I am having with room temperature, as clearly I don't want to spend money on such a system and find it hasn't helped very much! Any advice would be much appreciated.

[neilball]

Assuming that the underheating is not due to system problems - air in rads, rads undersized, inadequate flow to the top floor etc, then intelligent zone control should resolve the problem. You are right that the radiator controllers used by Hometronic have built-in local temperature measurement and all feed back their heating demand to the boiler relay module. Therefore if any radiator controller requires heat then the boiler, pump & any heating valves are switched on.

The other benefit of Hometronic will be that you can operate just the rooms that you want heated at that particular time rather than heating the entire house which can potentially save large amounts of energy if you only occupy a few rooms at any given time of day.

[StephenR]

I'm quite confident there are no fundamental problems with the system - and I would hope not because it is a new build! I have bled all radiators and the radiator in the top room does get very hot and in many cases does heat the room enough, its just that sometimes the system will turn off before the room has reached my preferred temperature.

The Hometronic system does sound good, but it may also be a bit pricey. Are there any other similar systems that have these electronic radiator values? In my searches I have only seen the ones from Hometronic, but it seems like such an obvious solution that I'm sure others must offer similar systems.

[neilball]

There is a simpler, self-install system that uses the same radiator controllers, CM Zone. It uses 2-channel programmers rather than a central unit like Hometronic. Take a look at the CM Zone website for more info. If you want to control lots of zones/rooms (i.e. control most radiators) then it can be more cost effective to go to Hometronic, the Hometronic Manager controls upto 16 rooms plus hot water and only needs 1 wireless boiler relay whereas in a CM zone system you need 1 boiler relay for every 4 CM67/CM927 units and a separate conventional timeclock for hot water.