RE: Interfacing to heating...

["Neil Ball" <neilball@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've not worked specifically with the Gledhill unit before but have
done
plenty of controls installations on systems that have a boiler feeding a
separate thermal store using the same principles for heating & hot
water
although the volume of stored water in the thermal store is much larger
with
the individual units compared with the Gledhill. With these kinds of system
there is no particular need to do anything except control the heating
demand
via the heating pump - the store needs to be up to temperature to provide
hot water via the plate heat exchanger so you cannot do anything to clever
to improve on the controls already fitted. In the case of the Gledhill and
if you are out for most of the day then you could shut down the entire unit
for a period to reduce the standing losses while the house is empty - no
one
is going to need hot water while you are out. You can also shut down the
unit while you are away but do make sure you can override the unit back on
if it is need for condensation/damp/frost protection.



You will get most benefit from improving the zoning/room temperature
control
and ensuring the heating pump only runs when there is a real heating demand
from one or more rooms- room by room zoning so you only heat the rooms in
use at that time, optimum start & proportional control of the zone
valves on
the rads etc so that you maintain your required comfort levels with the
minimum of energy etc.



You could go down the route of 4 CM Zone programmers, wireless boiler relay
& radiator actuators which will give you basic control without any
integration opportunities - each CM Zone programmer has 2 independent
zones.
Or look at Hometronic - the Manager offers up to 16 independent zones and
the interfaces from Sensible Heat can provide Telnet, RS232 or simple
volt-free input/output integration options. If you want more info on
Hometronic please drop me a line off-list.



Neil B.



_____

From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Phil Harris
Sent: 26 November 2007 22:36
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] Interfacing to heating...



OK - just put in an offer on a house today and that's been accepted so time
to start thinking about controlling the place a bit.

It's a recent build (only four years old) and has one of these ...

http://www.gledhill
<http://www.gledhill.net/water-storage/2000-range-index/gulfstream1a.htm>
.net/water-storage/2000-range-index/gulfstream1a.htm

( http://tinyurl. <http://tinyurl.com/yuf896>
com/yuf896 )

... fitted as the boiler. I've seen that there's a standard wall mounted
thermostat fitted in the place but I'm hoping to get a bit cleverer with
the
control than that (of course).

Has anyone here controlled one of those boilers externally before? I know I
can just have the timeclock "on" all the time and tap in to the
thermostat
switching line to give a "demand" signal but I'd like to be a bit
more
elegant than just leaving the boiler "on" all the time and simply
switching
the thermostat line if possible so does anyone have any experience of
driving one of these via an external system?

Similarly has anyone come across any RF controlled TRV actuators that can
be
triggered by either contact closures or serial port commands? Ideally
something like the HomeTronic RF actuators and probably with a minimum of 8
channels (it's not a big house) but it's going to be a bugger to get cables
to the rads to switch hard wired actuators.

Phil





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