Glow-worm boiler, hot water and radiator settings
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Diy3r
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Joined: Fri Oct 22, 2010 1:23 pm

Glow-worm boiler, hot water and radiator settings

by Diy3r » Thu Dec 09, 2010 2:26 pm

Hi,

I am new to this, so please bear with me if I come across as unkowledgeable on the subject, and I apologise in advance for the long post.

I have recently moved into a house and need some help/advice to set up the heating, radiator and hot water controls correctly. It seems like a pretty basic system (ex rental hosue so no surprise there). Basically we have a Glow Worm Micron 50ff boiler in the kitchen with a basic Honeywell Programmer. There is no option to control hot water and central heating seperately, so we use the valves on the raditors for this (eg when we just want hot water only we turn the rads off), and when we have the rads on the hot water heats up whether we need it or not. The boiler has a control on the bottom left but this has no temperature markings, just the control knob to turn between minimum and maximum.

There is a hot water cylinder in the spare room upstairs, and the F&E tank and main water tank in the loft. There is a tapstat (??? Looks like a trv with a coil running from it to the cyclinder jacket) on the side of the hot water cylinder, again no temperatuire indicator, the tapstat just has markings between 1-10 on the top. All the rads also have TA TRV's, again 1-10 markings on them. There is no thermostat in any of the rooms either.

My questions is primarily, what setting should the boiler control and the tapstat on the side of the hot water cylinder be set at? I have read the water in the tank should be 55-60c, but as there is no temperature indicator I have no idea if this would be setting 1 or 10 or inbetween. Also same for the boiler, I appreciate that it is based on personal preference, but should it be set quite low, or quite high?? At the moment we have the boiler setting at about 40% of max, the tapstat on the cylinder set at 3 out of 10, and the rads we use, on full (eg setting 10). Didnt want to whack everything up to max output for fear of doing damage to the system. The way we have it at the moment, seems OK in terms of hot water being hot but not scalding, rads get hot but it does take a while for rooms to heat up, currently they heat to about 16/17c (we have a newborn so dont want the room to be too hot) but I am a total novice and wanted to make sure I have got it set up correct (probably not!!!).

Thanks in advance and sorry for the length of the post!!