If you’re used to ordinary electric heaters from K-Mart, you might be confused about the idea of a dedicated heating system built into your house. With your K-Mart heater, you get up and switch it on when you’re feeling cold, and you switch it off when you’re feeling too warm.
With a built-in home heating system, everything is controlled automatically. You’d switch your system on with a master control switch at the beginning of your heating season, and turn it off at the end. We normally recommend that you switch on at Easter, and switch off at the end of October.
While it’s switched on, the heating system will be operated by a set of electronic controllers. There are two common types of controllers – thermostats and timeclocks.
A thermostat is a temperature sensor. You select the temperature that you want the room to be heated to, and the thermostat turns on the appropriate heating zone when required to maintain that temperature.
A timeclock is a programmable clock that lets you choose the hours you want the system to operate. Let’s say that you leave each weekday for work at 8.30am, and return home at 5.30pm. You could set your timeclock as ‘off’ during those hours so that you don’t have to pay to heat your house while you’re out.
Most modern digital timeclocks have 7-day programmable functionality so you can program a different schedule for the weekend, and so on.
So when your heating system is first commissioned, your install should discuss with you what sort of time schedule you require, and program these into the controllers (don’t forget to set the HWC controller!)
The thermostats are easy enough to set yourself and should be intuitive. Make sure that your supplier provides an instruction manual for the system.
Now you can sit back and relax in comfort and be warm in your home all year round!