Thursday, October 30, 2008

Misleading Energy Adverts

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Misleading
Energy Saving Adverts



Do you know all those adverts on TV the newspapers etc. telling you to turn down the thermostat and save energy and the environment?? Well - those adverts are quite misleading in many cases.

Why so are the adverts misleading?

The energy saving adverts are misleading because they do not tell you that turning down your oil fired boiler's thermostat will:

1. Make the boiler less efficient,
2. It will shorten the life of the boiler, and
3. And it will add to the build-up of dirt in the flue-ways of the boiler making it necessary to service it more often.
4. The lower water temperatures will make your radiators much less efficient also.

I should know I serviced many hundreds of boilers and the folks who kept the stat way down had much dirtier boilers and very often those boilers strung leaks due to the cold returning water in circulation. (There should be a hot water feed-back loop near the boiler in any case).

So what should you do then?

The thermostat to turn down is NOT the boiler thermostat which is usually situated right on the boiler unit. Instead the one to turn down is the thermostatic control which controls the room temperature. The room stat is usually NOT on or even near the boiler but situated in the rooms or hallway.

So maybe you would phone SEI and Change.ie and tell them to make these facts a bit clearer for the ordinary person to fully understand?




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2 comments:

Greennav said...

Sorry I commented on the other post before I saw this one.

You raise an interesting problem. That is that explaining complicated engineering issues is not possible in the sound bite worls we live in. Another ad they have tells people not to run the washing machine between 5 and 7, but I imagine 9/10 people don't understand why.

So what is the solution? (Not rhetorically... I'm really asking that question)

Donncha said...

I had no idea, but also unfortunately we don't have any room thermostat, only the dial on the boiler.

The only non-boiler control is the central heating timer which can be set at 30 minute intervals.

Should we set the boiler up high and set the timer to go on/off every consecutive 30 minute chunk of time?
'Course not, we need to get those radiator thermostats I presume. Our little baby boy would have a lot of fun with those!