andrewducker | Interesting Links for 30-03-2024

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I do fear that moving away from a building-wide system is a mistake

Zone heating is increasingly popular for fuel economy, with specialized thermostats and ordinary furnaces. The reasoning being that it's a waste of money/fuel to heat the bedrooms when nobody is using them. Or when everyone is upstairs in the bedroom and upstairs bathroom, you might as well keep the living room cool. What am I missing?

I do fear that moving away from a building-wide system is a mistake

Zone heating is increasingly popular for fuel economy, with specialized thermostats and ordinary furnaces.

That would still be a building-wide system.

The reasoning being that it's a waste of money/fuel to heat the bedrooms when nobody is using them. Or when everyone is upstairs in the bedroom and upstairs bathroom, you might as well keep the living room cool.

Agreed. It might still be more efficient to generate the heat centrally. Tradition says that economy of scale beats transmission losses, especially when you can use waste heat from some other process.

What am I missing?

With a heat pump, which usually has cooler "heat" fluid, it is significantly more efficient to keep a room warm than to reheat it when you want it warm.

Any heating or cooling system works best when the building is well insulated. If you turn the heat off in one room, then heat from the warm rooms around it will migrate to the colder room, so you are effectively heating the same space with fewer radiators or air vents. Or do you have well-insulated internal walls ?

Having said that, since heat pumps have cooler heat fluid, the transmission losses probably mean that they are not great for whole appartment blocks.

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Interesting Links for 30-03-2024

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