Devon stately home owners are delighted with the new heating system, designed, supplied and installed by Stove Shop

A new heating system for a Victorian mansion house in Devon has delighted its owners. The entire installation was designed, supplied and installed by Stove Shop, of Liskeard, Cornwall.

From the outset, the owners insisted the controls for the system must involve no damage to the historic decorations, no cable holes and no visible wiring. Stove Shop's simple solution was Honeywell wireless programmable thermostats, which use safe low power radio signals back to their boiler units. Each of these controllers combines comfort with energy efficiency by adjusting temperatures within each heating zone precisely and automatically to the household's needs at different times of the day.

Another advantage of the wireless controls was that they were installed in a small fraction of the time required by conventional “wired” controls, particularly bearing in mind the vastness of the building, the thicknesses of its interior walls and the long distances up to the system's two boilers, which are installed with heating manifolds, control valves and a specially designed wiring centre in former servants' quarters on the top floor.

The heating system has five zones: four for space heating, one for domestic hot water. One space heating zone can provide 113,000 Btu of heating, two of 76,000 Btu and one of 15,000 Btu, while the domestic hot water zone can deliver 20,000 Btu.

Each zone is fed via a motorised valve from a common manifold, served by two 150,000 Btu Worcester oil-fired boilers operating in parallel, each via a Grundfos pump. The first boiler to fire alternates automatically between the two, to even out wear, and is supplemented by the second boiler when necessary.

Stove Shop designed and built a special wiring centre to control the boilers, valves and pumps in response to heat demand signals from the Honeywell programmable thermostats and a Honeywell hot water cylinder thermostat. Data from additional thermostats mounted within the system's two return manifolds is used by to control boiler and pump switch-off and to close a motorised valve in each boiler return after a pump over-run period.

The home owners are delighted with the comfort and reliability of the heating system and also with the room controls which, they say, are very easy and convenient to use and, being wireless, can be wall-mounted or placed on a table.