If the temperature in a room drops significantly overnight, there can be various reasons. Energy consultant Luca Arenz has some tips on how to stay nice and warm.
When it is particularly cold at night in winter, it can often happen that you come into a surprisingly cool living room in the morning. This case occurs if, for example, the heating system is set to reduce the temperature at night, so that the flow temperature is automatically reduced during the night, mainly to save energy costs.
If the outside temperature also drops significantly during the night, two important factors come together. On the one hand, heat losses are increased due to the colder temperatures and on the other hand, the heating system reduces the flow temperature. The radiators no longer receive enough warm water to release enough heat into the room to reach a room temperature of 20 degrees.
Night time reduction is mainly set in buildings with poor energy efficiency. However, this makes no sense for new and modern buildings, especially those with underfloor heating, as these usually meet the energy standards and underfloor heating reacts far too slowly. To solve these problems, the night setback can be turned off and/or the flow temperature can be increased.
What is also crucial here is that the radiator or heating surface (underfloor heating) is the right size. If these dimensions are far too small, changing the settings will not bring any noticeable improvement.
Luca Arenz is managing director of ARCenergie GmbH and an expert in sustainable building planning. With his team, he implements holistic new construction and renovation concepts and shares his specialist knowledge YouTube. He is part of us EXPERTS Circles. The content represents his personal opinion based on his individual expertise.
Expert tip: lower the shutters in the evening!
As a tenant, you often don’t have much leeway when these heating problems arise. What is definitely a measure would be to check how the heating load, i.e. the necessary heat that has to be brought into the room in question, can be reduced.
One option here would be to lower the shutters as soon as it gets dark to at least slightly reduce heat loss during the night. In addition, the tightness of the window or frame can be checked. Leaks and drafts, especially during cold nights, result in high heat loss and eliminating or optimizing such problem areas in coordination with the landlord can have a very big effect.
In old buildings, large window areas and single-glazed, non-tightly installed panes are also an important factor that can lead to significant heat loss. Subsequent sealing can often make a significant difference.
Especially in attic apartments, it can often be the case that the pipes, for example the gas heating system, that run through the roof are not adequately insulated. Appropriate sealing can also help here.
Cold rooms: What you should pay attention to when it comes to doors
In general, it can also be helpful to put it in front of the apartment entrance door and other room doors Draft excluder (so-called door dachshunds) to minimize the exchange of air and the resulting heat loss. The room doors should also generally remain closed, especially in rooms that get too cold overnight.
One of the most important factors is the original planning of the heating system if the entire heating system for the building was not designed and dimensioned correctly from the start. This means that the system as such cannot work optimally at low outside temperatures. Accordingly, it is important that hydraulic balancing and calculation of the heating load are absolutely necessary during the initial planning and also when replacing the heating system or just the radiators, especially in a building with 6 or more residential units.
However, these measures are very often not carried out in new buildings or renovations and the heating system for the entire building is usually only designed based on an estimate by the heating engineer. Not only in old buildings or renovations, but also in new buildings in connection with underfloor heating, this often means that rooms cannot get warm enough at all.
In conclusion, it can be said that the correct setting of the heating system by the heating engineer has the greatest influence. If these settings are not correct and have been determined through previous heating load calculations and hydraulic balancing, the heating system cannot work optimally. However, this can often be remedied by changing the flow temperature and/or the pump performance.
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