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Setback savings - fact or fiction?

cathodeRay · 2025-02-27T11:24:11Z

This is a renewed attempt to solve the setback riddle - do setbacks save money without compromising comfort? So far this apparently simple question has eluded a confident answer, largely because the empirical results and theoretical predictions do not agree. This means either one of them, or possibly both, are wrong. The initial posts here have been moved from another thread as they no longer related to that thread's title.

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Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs)

Last Post by PeterWurmsdobler 55 minutes ago

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PeterWurmsdobler

(@peterwurmsdobler)

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14/05/2026 3:05 pm

@cathoderay many thanks for sharing the analysis of your heating data, in particular with respect to the night-time temperature set-point reduction, aka setback. Very interesting results indeed, and since I do not have a heat-pump installed yet, your findings are quite interesting to me too.

In preparation to specifying a heat pump for our house I have taken historical external temperature and gas consumption data combined with a simple thermal model of our house to work out the power/energy expenditure as a function of control algorithms, e.g. operate like a gas boiler, constant set-point temperature, or night-time set-back to various degrees. Simulation runs also confirmed that a modest set-back by about one degree seems to be the optimum; too little, and energy is wasted unnecessarily, too much and the COP suffers when bringing the temperature back up.

That said, I wondered if with all the wealth of data you have over two years, you could create a rather sophisticated multiple-input-multiple-output dynamic model for your heating system and house and use the data for system parameter identification; then you could run any controller in a closed loops simulation using all extrinsic data (external temperature, appliances, occupancy, etc), show the effects of control strategy (including magnitude of setback), and finally validate the empirical findings. Just a thought.

Kind regards,

peter

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