Zoning#

Zoning means making it possible to set timings for the heating that apply to less than the whole building. It is common for community buildings to have to heat two large rooms whenever either is in use, or a large room whenever a set of small rooms is in use. In this case, zoning can greatly reduce energy use.

Zoning can also pay off in less extreme cases, but please read our advice about ensuring there is enough heat demand to make sense for your system. If you have a large boiler that can only be on or off, it may not make sense, or even be possible to run it, just to heat a couple of small rooms. Even modulating boilers might have a minimum output that makes heating just a few rooms very inefficient.

In this case, consider independent electric heating to replace use of the main heating in some small rooms, like offices, that are frequently used when the large spaces are empty. If no one is sure when the room will be occupied, radiant heating is very quick to make people comfortable.

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 could make a cold wall very noticeable, affecting comfort. You may 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.

If zoning is right for you, the best approach is to use motorised valves to control the flow of hot water to radiator circuits that can be individually controlled with different time programmes. This requires separate pipework circuits for the different zones, but installing them isn’t always expensive or disruptive. Once your system is zoned, you can a different timeswitch or programmer for each zone or one that has multiple “channels” for multiple zones.

If zoning is too hard, you can consider internet controls as alternative way of zoning the building. With internet controls, hot water will still flow around all of the pipework in your building whenever the boiler is on, but you would at least be able to program the timings for the radiators room by room using “smart” or programmable TRVs.

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When smart TRVs won’t work

Sometimes in big stone buildings, it’s hard to get the radios in smart TRVs to communicate.

There are some TRVs that you can program with a heating schedule and control using a phone app, usually only when you are within 10m of the radiator. The manufacturers usually describe these as “smart TRVs”, but that term is also used for TRVs that are controllable over the internet and can work together with other controls.

There are also a few obscure TRVs still on the market that have a small battery-operated programmer on them that can be used to bring the radiator on using an independent heating schedule. They are a pain to program because the controls are so small and almost always down near the floor, but they can be useful in rooms that have very regular heating schedules. Electrobock, Terrier, and Olympia have all sold them in the past.