I am looking at a village hall with heating via fixed elec panel heaters, 2 stand-alone elec heaters and an apparently very disappointing ASHP with claimed output of approx. 3kW.

The hall was built in 1998/99, should have U values of 0.45 (walls), 0.25 (roof) and 0.45 (floors). How 'tightly' it was built is not known, although there is generally 200 - 300mmm in the roof. User experience suggests that, particularly for activities involving being on the floor, it is not perceived as warm.

Use of the hall is regular, but quite low, suggesting that the best short-term 'fix' might be remote control of the existing heaters rather than any replacement of heaters at this stage.

There is no mains gas in the village.

I am not an electrician, and do not often deal with electric heating.

Has anyone used 'remote' control of electric heating, either via an on-site multi-option controller or something accessible by mobile phone?

Thanks,

Nick

Cheers Owlman,

It looks like it can do what I want, but it's BIG for what they'd need at the hall, I think. I did not check the CU, but I suspect they have 1 ring-main, one lighting circuit and maybe 3 or 4 (but perhaps as few as two) circuits for the heaters. The minimum size of this one appears to allow 30 circuits.

Again, flagging up my electrical ignorance in public, but I wonder how things like 'hive' work. At its very simplest all a 'remote control' would have to do is turn on the power supply to a 'stat', provided 'all on'/'all off' was acceptable.

(As I wrote the phrase 'remote control' I had a whimsical vision of a drone with a camera, operated from afar, with a 'poking stick' attached, allowing the operator to turn on the power isolator

I feel simpler possibilities may be out there!)

Thanks again. Nick

I've always used Hager breakers, because I've found their tech department very helpful. A call to them may be a good place to start.

https://www.hager.co.uk/product-catalogue/building-automation/38695.htm

We have electric panel heaters (https://www.millheat.co.uk/) that can be controlled remotely. Bought for aesthetics and because they are 'Lot 20' (efficiency standard) compliant and bathroom safe, rather than remote control specifically.

Against my better judgement we finally gave in and started using the WiFi function recently, having lived for a few months on manual only and now of course we use it quite a lot in these 'shoulder' months where the temperature varies quite significantly.

It's a fairly simple interface that's controlled over a smartphone app. As philedge mentions above, it relies on having an internet connection, though for other reasons we also don't have a fixed landline either so use a 4G dongle for this. EE sell a tiny yellow one that's pay as you go and works well provided it's plugged in.

All commercially available off the shelf and easy to install. You'd need to figure out your heat load first but I'm hoping others on here might help with that. It would be easier with an idea of the surface area of heat loss and the floor area of the building.

As usual you probably want to look at minimising any obvious draughts and weak points first.

Thanks everyone. A good range of options. I had thought about simply using a 7-day programmer, but I think the committee wants a bit of flexibility. GreenPaddy's solution sounds particularly basic/simple (apart from the bits which he rightly assumes have whizzed over my head, but I think my electrician will understand). I have not got their consumption figures yet, but I have everything I need (except knowledge of how the as-built U values match up to those in Part L at the time - possibly not that well) to do the heat-loss calcs.

I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again.

Nick

Hi Mike1, ah no, the *elec usage* is quite low, but so's the hall, at 2.4m. Too low for de-strat fans, I think, but thanks for the thought. The last village hall I did had an apex height of nearly 4.5m, so yes, that would have applied.

Cheers,

Nick