Should we turn off the heating when we go to work?

The heating season in Poland lasts from October to the end of March. Sometimes even longer. The costs of keeping heat in apartments are getting higher and higher. It’s no wonder that people are looking for ways to save. There are many different ways to reduce your bills online. One of them says to turn the radiators down to minimum when we leave home for a few hours to go to work. We will check what experts who support such solutions say. We will also give a voice to those who suggest not doing this.

Do you want to save? Turn off the radiator

Although building insulation technology is getting better and better, unfortunately we have not yet been able to stop the laws of physics. These are inexorable and cause heat always escapes outside , and this exchange continues as long as the temperature drops. they won’t equalize. Therefore, when we turn on the radiator, some of the heat remains in the house, but some of it constantly escapes. And if so, we are losing money heating the world immersed in winter weather. It’s certainly not the best way to spend your money.

The matter was also dealt with by experts from the Energy Saving Trust website. They claim that leaving the heating on, even at a minimum, reduces our budget. They write on their website that “If you keep the heat on all day, you are losing energy all that time.”

You might think that the matter is settled. The last person to leave the house turns off the radiators, and the first to return turns them on. This solution is good, especially if we want to reduce current bills. However, there is the other side of the coin.

Do you want comfort and no problems? Leave the heater on

Some experts disagree with the approach of completely turning off the heating when we are not at home. Some of them argue that saving money is not the only thing that counts in life. When we come home we want to be warm and feel nice. It will take some time before we turn on the radiator and heat the room to our favorite temperature. And the colder it is outside, i.e. the more we need heat, the longer it will take to achievethermal comfort .

Condensation problems may occur more often when radiators are completely turned off. Why? Because it occurs when the temperature drops below the so-called dew point. If the room is cold, let’s say 16℃, and the humidity is 70%, water will start to condense at a wall temperature of 10.49℃ (this is possible when it is frosty outside or the building has poor insulation). We write more about condensation in the article How to prevent water condensation on walls?

But that’s not all. There are also psychological effects! If we do not have electronic heating control and we have to turn on each radiator in the house manually, we may forget about it. Then we may feel guilty for not turning off the heating. There is also a possibility that while at work we will start to wonder whether we really turned on the radiators before leaving. This may lead to poor concentration and mistakes.

The Golden mean?

Is there a golden mean to combine energy saving and thermal comfort? Certainly, these include electronic heating management systems and entire smart home systems. Thanks to them, we can program the radiators to always maintain a specific temperature. We can also set them to heat the room to the optimal level half an hour before our arrival.

Those who do not have such technical or housing possibilities have to answer the question – whether they want to have lower bills or the comfort of using the apartment.

The most important thing is good thermal insulation

There is one more element worth paying attention to. Although we mentioned at the beginning that heat will always escape, we can try to slow down this process. How? Through good thermal insulation of the building. One way to insulate is to use paints or thermal insulating masses, containing glass microspheres.

You can find more about them in the article at this link. We write about the method of operation, all properties and applications.

Ecological thermal insulation coatings produced by us in Poland can be purchased in our online store.