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Heating system hysteresis and efficiency
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paulca:

--- Quote from: james_s on January 30, 2021, 07:21:34 pm ---I assume you must have a gas flow meter somewhere, otherwise the utility would not be able to bill you accurately. Is that not located somewhere you can access? It's pretty easy to turn off any other gas appliances and then read the consumption over a specific interval on the meter. My gas meter is electronically monitored so I can log into my utility site and see a graph of daily consumption in almost real time.

--- End quote ---

Of course.  Yes.  I meant an automated, data logging method.

I can, as you rightly point out, just read the meter myself.  Although it's mechanical.

However any realistic period I measure it over will ultimately be skewed by current weather making it hard to make a determination....  a constantly logged data set would make that easier.
james_s:

--- Quote from: paulca on January 30, 2021, 07:36:00 pm ---Of course.  Yes.  I meant an automated, data logging method.

I can, as you rightly point out, just read the meter myself.  Although it's mechanical.

However any realistic period I measure it over will ultimately be skewed by current weather making it hard to make a determination....  a constantly logged data set would make that easier.

--- End quote ---

Does it have any sort of mechanism that you could read electronically from the outside, say a reflective opto sensor "watching" a dial pointer go by? A lot of ours have some type of mechanical indicator that rotates so that it's easy to see if gas is flowing, even the old ones that are purely mechanical and manually read. I have no idea if gas meters worldwide are anything similar.
paulca:
I haven't looked.  TBH.  It might have a standard pulse LED which I think is standard and there is software available to monitor those.  If not, there are projects to OCR Optical Character Recognition the digits off the meter. 

it just comes down to risk versus reward.

Looking closely at the data over the winter, I have serious insulation issues with the bedroom and it's not a surprise.   I insulated the main roof above last year.  This has made the roof space a ventilated cold space.  The trouble is that same cold space borders directly onto the bedroom wall and the bedroom floor/livingroom ceiling.  Causing the gap between the two rooms to be a cold space with no insulation.  I intend to address this.

Asides, it's an interesting test of the system under load.  The priority is to fix the insulation.  Monitoring the gas meter is second fiddle.
penfold:

What you pose is a very interesting control problem. Based on the amount of swearing I heard when sharing a PhD office with someone tacking this very problem, it's very 'interesting' indeed.

The big problem when tacking this kind of optimisation problem in a domestic setting is trying to work out exactly what 'efficient' means. In a large office it's quite simple, there's one room, one temperature and the target is minimum cost for most consistent temperature. But for a house with more rooms than people and a tendency for said people to want to move from one to the other and expect it to be at the same temperature its a very different problem, there's always a relatively large thermal mass in the fabric of the building compared to the amount of air so its very easy for rooms to 'feel' much colder than they are and there's a lot of thermal mass to heat up before the 'comfort' rating builds up.. then its very inefficient to keep one room warm whilst there's nobody in it and that becomes something you need to factor into your 'efficiency'.

If your gas meter is an electronic one, you'll probably find it pings a packet of data from an IR LED every second or so, the electric meter I have does that and it contains the current reading and other status info... could be useful.
nctnico:

--- Quote from: penfold on February 01, 2021, 05:45:50 pm ---
What you pose is a very interesting control problem. Based on the amount of swearing I heard when sharing a PhD office with someone tacking this very problem, it's very 'interesting' indeed.

The big problem when tacking this kind of optimisation problem in a domestic setting is trying to work out exactly what 'efficient' means. In a large office it's quite simple, there's one room, one temperature and the target is minimum cost for most consistent temperature. But for a house with more rooms than people and a tendency for said people to want to move from one to the other and expect it to be at the same temperature its a very different problem, there's always a relatively large thermal mass in the fabric of the building compared to the amount of air so its very easy for rooms to 'feel' much colder than they are and there's a lot of thermal mass to heat up before the 'comfort' rating builds up.

--- End quote ---
Not just that. Keeping one room cold means the room at the other side of the wall (or on the next floor) will also feel colder. In the end you don't want large temperature differences in a relatively small building like a home. You can't really treat rooms like single islands because they are physically connected and heat will transfer from one to the other.

Floor heating is something to consider though (especially when mounted directly under the tiles and not covered by several cm of cement) because it brings the heat source closer to the persons in the room and the heat is distributed more evenly. A commonly found claim is that floor heating saves about 15%.
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