Good Practices for Ducted Gas Heating during Winter

kaleidoscope on 11/06/2020 - 09:50
Last edited 14/06/2020 - 18:57

Edit:
Thanks all for the helpful information. While digging around the subject happened to stumble on this great little website as well which had really useful links.

https://greenityourself.com.au/

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Hello all,
Would like to know some of the best practices for keeping house warm in winter days without breaking the bank and reduce energy wastage. I live in 4 bedroom house with zoned ducted heating. (1 zone for master and one theatre area, next zone covers living area and last zone 3 other bedrooms).

Is there a particular time to schedule the heater to operate automatically and roughly how many hours do you guys keep the heater running per day (excludes extreme weather days of course).

Background : I've previously lived in 2 bed apartment which had split system for living area and we used oil column in bedroom. Now having moved to new place last year, it has zoned ducted heating (+ the oil columns Ive used previously, so quite different environments).

Cheers,

Home & Garden

closed Comments

  • GG57 on 11/06/2020 - 10:06
    +1

    Totally dependant on how you use those zoned areas, over the period of the whole day.
    And perhaps with a different program for weekends when the usage pattern may be different.
    And what you find as a comfortable temperature, during the day, evening and overnight.

    If your house is well insulated, it can be efficient to run the heating at a medium temp for longer, and let the thermostat do the work.

  • BertieBrown on 11/06/2020 - 10:31
    +3

    What we’ve found, is that we were using one large wall furnace to heat ‘the house’ even though we were only in one room, as we didn’t have a smaller electric heater. The electric heater wouldn’t have been able to heat the entire house, so in that sense it made sense to use the gas heater, but, it was just too costly to run if we were mainly in one room.

    So, my advice would be focus the heat in the room you’re using for a short period of time.

    Also, get yourself a thermometer. It can be hard to differentiate between temps, but, if you can see that it’s actually 15 degrees, you might be more inclined to accept it rather than feeling cold and thinking it must be bloody freezing.

    The main issue, from my perspective anyway, is that I used the heater more than I needed to. It didn’t need to be on, but I forgot about it, or I ‘felt’ cold even though in reality it was actually 15 or 16 degrees and I just needed to put some warmer clothes on.

    • kaleidoscope on 11/06/2020 - 14:49

      Thanks this is similar situation we're in, sometimes the heater is running because people forget to turn it off when leaving area for longer periods. I have timers set for each zone, so when manually turned on would auto off in 2 hours, overtime this becomes kind of annoying to get up and turn it on every 2 hours or so. Have thermometers in each zone + couple of others in wall clocks. I will look into space / personal heaters.

      Around sleep time on average, how many hours do you guys keep the heaters on?

      • BertieBrown on 11/06/2020 - 20:18
        +1

        Previously I guess around 3-4 hours at night for the gas furnace.

        With the small electric because it was right next to the bed I guess maybe around 2-3.

        But we’ve gone heat neutral because our gas bill is likely to be so high, with still a month of gas hot water and gas cooking left.

        Our entire heating usage was just too high. I think just mainly because it’s not easy to continually monitor usage so out of sight out of mind.

        Historically people made do with much less heat, but, a lot of the reason why we spend so much in Australia on heating, and cooling is because of shit older builds, such as our house, that just have no insulation in them. I have a feeling that wall insulation wasn’t even mandatory until the early 90’s which just boggles the mind. Energy prices were cheaper then, but of course were all paying for it now.

  • randomusername99 on 11/06/2020 - 10:59
    +3

    Lots of good info here
    https://www.yourhome.gov.au/energy/heating-and-cooling

    If possible, a good first step is to seal any drafts between inside and outside of house.

    • kaleidoscope on 11/06/2020 - 14:50

      Thanks, whole lot of info there :)

      • thatonethere on 11/06/2020 - 19:47
        +1

        Draft rectification is key.

  • pjetson on 11/06/2020 - 23:01

    Our ducted heating is set to come on half an hour before I used to get up for work (pre-Covid), and off again after everyone would have left for the day. Then, it turns on again half an hour before anyone used to get home, then off again at 10:30pm. It's off all night.

    Now that we're all home all day, it's still set the same, but if we get cold in the middle of the day, we manually turn it back on.

    We have it set to 20 degrees.

  • Euphemistic on 12/06/2020 - 05:38

    Set the thermostat low, don’t expect to be walking around without a jumper inside.
    Use it as little as possible. Learn how your house responds to the cold and only turn it on when the house will be too cold for you.

  • ofey on 13/06/2020 - 13:11

    The most basic advice regardless of age of house or build quality, keep all your doors closed.

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