[OpenTRV-interest] Weather compensation

[John]

On 22/12/16 13:53, Damon Hart-Davis wrote:
>> Why do you think weather comp would have a long payback time? Even
>> at the price manufacturers charge for their thermistor-in-a-box
>> sensors and the labour required to fit them the total cost should
>> be in the £100-£200 range which should give a payback well within
>> the lifetime of the kit.
>
> The government’s own figures are suggesting >> 10 years.

Really? Where?

Do they break it down i.e. do they estimate the cost to be huge or the 
savings to be miniscule?

> More than half UK homes are missing one or more of timer / house
> thermostat / TRVs.

I'm probably seeing a skewed sample but not hugely suprised

> Housing Associations that we have spoken to report timer usage in the
> low percent range down to zero, ie with the people often in most need
> of the potential savings.

Another skewed sample - but as you say generally those who most need 
effective controls

> DECC and other studies are fairly clear that few people interact much
> with their heating system well or at al..
>
> Even in the household of a British Gas person we did a trial
> installation with, they just manually turned their house stat up and
> down to turn heating on and off!

;-/

It's a problem I'm aware of, particularly in private rented - mostly 
student lets with a more or less annual turnover of tenants (who may 
have brains the size of planets when it comes to microbiology or 
whatever but seem clueless about time and temperature controls!).

I'm leaning towards weather comp to generally tailor the heating to 
demand with a simple timer (left set to a sensible programme and which 
they'll hopefully just leave alone).

I suspect the ideal naive-user system would comprise a controller with 
room occupancy sensors and room thermostats which simply communicated a 
"more heat"/"less heat" signal to the controller which would tell the 
boiler when heat was required and tell TRVs which rooms required it.


> What about a non-proprietary smart TRV that does not need networking
> and pays back within a year, say an *open* cough cough TRV design?
> %-P

Available, debugged and in mass production, when?!

I thought the consultation was for a revision to Part L to come into 
effect in the next couple of years?


-- 
John Stumbles                                    http://stumbles.org.uk
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