Maintaining thermal mass vs starting heating later in season?
Has anyone considered the difference strategies between these:
1. Start heating soon, so as to maintain the temperature of the thick stone walls, etc we have, so we are only trickling heat into the building. However it would mean starting the heating maybe 2-4 weeks earlier in the season
2. Keeping the heating off, then having a few days where the HP has to work quite hard to bring the building back up to temperature. Trying to heat a room with cold stone walls is hard. But it means keeping the heating off for longer
To give context our building is old, and while insulated, there's still a lot of exposed stonework (until our retrofit is complete).
Outside temp here is about 16c now, 12-13c overnight. The house is maintaining about 19-20c with windows open, no heating. So the stone is doing it's work!
250sqm house. 30kWh Sunsynk/Pylontech battery system. 14kWp solar. Ecodan 14kW. BMW iX.
I suppose internal brickwork or brickwork that is insulated on the outside will stay approximately at your internal temp throughout winter. Uninsulated brickwork will settle into being 20C on the inside and coldish on the outside over time.
As I see it, adding heat before the inside gets below your set point won't give any benefit. If it were me I would turn on the heating as soon as the internal temp drops below the set point, but not before. 🙂
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