I have a very spacious living room (17x8x3) with 4 radio towers (central heating). In cold weather it remains fresh even with the central heating at its maximum.
We plan to place a glass wall in the middle of this space.
Thus, only half of the living room would be heated with 2 radiators. (the radiators in the other part of the living room are turned off).
My question is whether I can achieve higher temperatures in this way and whether the halved room (with 2 radiators) heats up faster than the entire room with 4 radiators.
Answer
Dear Guido,
To answer your question directly:
Yes. If a room would lose 4 kW at a constant indoor temperature, you can compensate for this with a number of radiators that together give off 4 kW. A smaller space with a heat loss of 2 kW will indeed be able to be kept warm with half of these radiators, whereby the same water temperatures and water flow rates can be used per radiator as in the first case.
However, your accompanying text is about a specific case, for which you unfortunately do not provide enough information to formulate a complete answer. Unfortunately, based on this alone, I cannot give a definitive answer to your question: it could be that your 2 radiators are sufficient, but most likely not!
It is best to call in a heating installer, or make a quick heat load calculation yourself.
You will probably have to increase the radiators used, possibly also the flow rate of water they receive.
Allow me to clarify this further:
Radiators in a heating system serve to compensate for the heat losses that a room loses via convection (air movement, mainly through ventilation), conduction (conduction, mainly through the outer walls) and radiation (mainly through the windows). Evaluating the required heating (and thus radiator capacities) therefore comes down to making a heat loss calculation (heat balance) of your room (possibly on 1 side of the glass plate).
To judge whether half of the radiators will be sufficient to provide the required heating power, it is best to look at the heat losses that part of the room currently has. Is it mainly interior walls or heated spaces to which that space adjoins, or mainly exterior walls?
However, if the temperature in the other part of the room (behind the glass plate) will not be kept at room temperature, you must calculate an additional heat loss from the warm to the cold zone!
A well-sized system will still be able to maintain the desired comfort temperature under design conditions (usually an outside temperature of -10°C). You write: “In cold weather it remains fresh, despite your heating system running at full speed”.
Based on this I would say that your system:
A) Either it is dimensioned too small somewhere. This can be due to:
A1) the boiler (heating capacity too low),
A2) at the distribution (too low water flow rates through the radiators in the living space, possibly due to poor water-side balancing)
A3) or on the emission side (radiators that are too small).
B) Another possible cause could be a bad control (clock control, thermostat, temperature compensating control, …).
If A1) was the problem, placing the wall and turning the other radiators on will lead to faster heating. If A2 or A3 was the problem, this will only get worse if you shut off the existing radiators. After all, the other radiators and the slightly increased water flow rate will be insufficient to be able to supply the greater heating capacity.
Regards,
Joachim Verhelst
KHKempen
Answered by
ir. Joachim Verhelst
Energy, HVAC, Thermal Building Modeling
http://www.thomasmore.be
.