Alde wet heating v blown air
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It is a little different at home Boff - but there are some similarities in how we use the heating. At home: Generally heating comes on around 6am for an hour. It comes on again around 3pm I think for an hour. If the weather outside is cold we may overide - usually after3pm. Today was one of those days and this afternoon it was ON. OH has just gone to bed and switched it off. The bedroom will be warm but we will have the heating off and a top window light slightly open. We don' run it overnight as we are quite warm enough with the level of insulation and what would be comfortable before bedtime we would find too warm overnight. The same would not be the case in the caravan over a night like tonight as insulation is not as high.
Our heating is controlled by thermostatic valves. However during the day we do not need the same high temperatures as when sat in the evening.
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Just got into bed. The Alde heating is still on and it’s all toasty warm through out the van with no cold spots. I know that at 11pm it will switch off and come on again at 6am without further user intervention. If it’s gets cold in the night it will come on again - without user intervention. Just like your central heating at home.
Wouldn’t be without it.
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6am for an hour and 3pm for an hour! Hardly time to get warm. Ours comes on at 5am as I’m up for work at 6am so it’s nice and warm. Goes off at 8.30 when everyone has left home. On again at 4pm so when everyone gets in from work it’s nice and warm and goes off at 9pm although most evenings we override it for another hour at least.
Same with our Alde in the van. We’ve been out most of the day today but left it on low so it was nice and warm when we got back.
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6am for an hour and 3pm for an hour! Hardly time to get warm.
That would be true Mbee except that it will not have got cold at this time of year. If it were bitterly cold through the early morning and near freezing outside on awaking then we would keep the heating on if we thought that there was a need.
Our home is fairly well insulated and tends to be cool in hot weather and retain heat well in cold weather.
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Not if it's like ours Nellie. Just reset the clock and switch the two temp function back on. It remembers the on off times and temperatures. We don't have a battery back up. I think if you do it remembers everything, so you don't even have to reset the clock.
Total time to reset 30 secs to a minute.
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We have battery back up on ours, so no need to reset anything.
Without the back up it retains all the settings other than day and time.
Cold here tonight, we are currently running the house heating from 1 hour before we get up for 2 hours, then from 6pm till 10pm.
When it is really cold and dull we often switch it on during the day, but when it is sunny the sun warms the house well as we have big south facing windows.
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"Without the back up it retains all the settings other than day and time."
You can work around one bit of this with the 3010. If you set the overnight feature to "everyday" [0] then without having the luxury of a battery back up it is then only the time [Clock] that needs resetting; the timings and temperatures are all retained naturally.
Pity the van builders simply dont spec up the vans to feature battery support it would for them only add a handful of pounds onto a £20K odd price.
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Ours just comes on and goes off according to the temperature, then we play a good game of thermostat wars. I like the temperature quite high and Carol likes it lower. Whenever we go past the thermostat it gets tweaked up or down according to who has passed the thermostat last.
David
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That must be what ours does, it is a 3010. We use the same setting everyday.
If I remember correctly ( not used the van for a month now) the "time setting" is day......hour.....minutes.
This is the bit it forgets. All other function settings are remembered
I do agree the battery back up should be standard, in our 2008 van it was not, we complained, dealer fitted it for nothing.
The other feature that should have been standard IMO is the load monitor, an excellent feature, we fitted that ourselves once we realised it was not already fitted.
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Very happy with our Coachman VIP 460 2012 combi boiler system, better on gas than electric though. The end bathroom did not get as warm as the rest of the van, so I lagged the 3 feet of ducting that went under the van, now much improved. Temp set over night at 15 deg and then we awake close the front vents, up the temp to heat the bathroom before showering.
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I presume you mean at home? In the van OH guards the Alde controller and does all the adjustments, It is on the end of the unit on "her side" so I rarely get to touch it!
We don't have a thermostat at home, only thermostatic radiator valves, we rarely alter them unless we need to heat a bedroom for a guest, or use a room that is seldom used.
Bedrooms and seldom used rooms we set to "1", hallway and frequently used rooms are set to "3" or "3.5".
IMO, fitting a thermostat to a system with TRVs is defeating the point of the TRVs.
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95% of heating engineers recommend a thermostate in the main room and no trv's. trv's in the rest of the rooms as the main room should be higher temp than the bedrooms so to speak. once the main room reaches temp termo will cut of heating but bedrooms would have cut of a lot earlier as trv's set on lower temp. each to their own i suppose.
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Our daughter has a fairly new house, with TRVs, the thermostat is in the hall as is the radiator without the TRV. It is a small radiator and heats the whole hall, staircase, and 2 upper landings so the area round the thermostat never reaches what she has it set to, that way the TRVs work as intended.
Our house is 30 years old, no thermostat but no TRV on the smallest radiator in the hall as it acts as a bypass for the system. If we had to fit a thermostat it would go there, be set high, and the system would still operate as it does now.
Fitting the thermostat in the lounge means only that room is actually at the temperature you want. If the thermostat turns off the heating, no other room can get any more heat. If you have rooms which are not used all the time, so not constantly heated to the temperature you would want when you are using the room, then you are not going to be able to heat those rooms when you want to unless the lounge thermostat is calling for heat too.
This seems to me to be a very inflexible way of heating a house.
These days rooms often have a dual function, kids use their bedrooms for study purposes in the evening, a small bedroom may be a permanent study which is only used occasionally. An en suite bathroom may only be used morning and evening, you may want a higher temperature when showering, there are many variations.
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I would agree.
We have the header tank pump, in the wardrobe opposite the bed. It is virtually inaudible, you have to open the wardrobe door to check it is running.
At night, when all is totally silent, if you are awake, you can hear it start up, but it is not so loud as to actually waken you. OH is a very light sleeper, so if it was that loud, she would be complaining!
I can sleep through anything, so I have never heard it.
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Totally disagree that you can hardly hear the Aldi pump we had the system in both lunar clubman's and the Bailey Madrid, drove us mad when it kick in in early morning and then out when it got to temp once it dropped temp in it came again, in both Lunars it was situated in the wardrobe, in the Madrid under the off side front bed. Who ever slept on the off side always woke them up, in the Lunars we were both woken up Now in the Coachman 460 VIP with the Combi set on eco never hear anything. The new model Coachman's have gone to Aldi which l feel is a retrograde step. Will defiantly be keeping the Coachman for quite along time, it will probably be our last van
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All I can say is in our van the Alde system is almost silent. By that I mean you have to strain to hear the inline pump running. It does on gas make an audible click when the gas valve first opens up. Not normally loud enough to wake me up. But the installation is in a wardrobe and we are not sleeping on it like is the case in some vans. As for the Truma combi system I have no real experience. But our friends Coachman it was very noisy when it first started up.
Alde hesting is currently very fashionable, so there must be a temptation for manufacturers to penny pinch on the installation to save costs. But still be able to claim it’s fitted with an Alde system.
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We had a Sterling with blown air, followed by a Lunar Ultima with wet heating and have just changed to a Coachman with blown air. I have to say that as all had a thermostat I can't say we've noticed the difference in heat levels particularly. We just set the thermostat and leave it to its own devices really. The wet heating system in the Lunar was in the wardrobe next to the bed and it could be noisy with the fan. A big consideration is the cost of changing the antifreeze in the wet system which is a lot in addition to the annual service cost.
All in all the layout and style of the van was far more important when we were looking at a replacement.
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Our boiler is under the bed, but the only sound from it is a small "ping" when it kicks in on electricity, or a slightly louder click if using gas.
It seems to be more usual these days to fit the boiler mounted pump, so might be more noise then.
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We now have the 5 year antifreeze in ours, I recently changed it myself, simple to do in our Sterling, I think the replacement concentrate cost me less than £40, so not significant in the overall cost of owning a van.
I think our dealer charges something like £150, so £30 per year over the 5 year life.
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Our pump is on the boiler and is only noticeable as a very faint whine, even when very quiet. It is located under the offside bench seat, which we have never used as a bed, as there are two fixed singles.
Perhaps it might seem a bit louder, if you were sleeping on it, depending where you put your head in relation to the pump.
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