Zone your heating#
Zoning means making it possible to set timings for the heating that apply to less than the whole building.
The traditional approach to zoning involves motorised valves that open and close to control the supply of hot water to different circuits in the building. In a house, that might put the bedrooms on a different circuit that is heated to a different schedule and a lower temperature than the main rooms.
There are other solutions that are cheaper and much less disruptive to fit because they never require changes to the pipework. For instance, there are thermostatic radiator valves that you programme at the radiator. That’s a pain because it involves using a small screen down near the floor on every radiator, but it’s useful for some venues. There are also “smart TRVs” where you tell an app which radiators are in which rooms and then program each room independently. These systems might save less energy than full zoning because the system still needs to send hot water around all the circuits, but it’s a much easier change and has the advantage that rooms are then independently controllable.
Electric heating usually has a switch per room or per radiator already, although occasionally we run into electric heating in a big space that could also be “zoned”, so that if a space is only partly occupied some of the radiators can be left off.
If zoning is overkill but you are heating a large area for the sake of one small office, you can also consider using a different source of heating altogether.
If you decide to zone your building, keep in mind that if you have lightweight walls or air movement, trying to keep adjacent spaces very different temperatures will create draughts and make a cold wall very noticeable, affecting comfort. You’ll need to bring the building to a basic temperature and then just top up some rooms to normal levels rather than try to keep some spaces completely unheated.