A little bit of mid-week prep work before the coming weekend: fitting the wiring centre. This is the box of electronics which talks to the boiler and underfloor heating bits and tells who to do what and when. It's linked to wireless thermostats in different zones so that you can have full control of heating. We have a zone per underfloor loop (kitchen, utility and shower, dining room, hall) and one for each upper floor.
With a network of valves and wires we can schedule each zone individually for a more efficient system. When you have drafts, single glazing and little insulation this can only be a good thing.
The thing itself is, at least on the outside, fairly unassuming and plain. Within lies a neat layout of relay switches and screw terminals. There isn't much else to it.
Most of Saturday was spent trying to work out how to make it talk to the boiler. The boiler was equipped with its own wireless thermostat, whose receiver plugged into the front via a low voltage pogo connector. This would have to be removed in case it tried talking over the top of the wiring centre. The only other links were very short jumper wires from the boiler's mains outlet into both the hot water and radiator terminals. Hmmmmm.
Some hours later, after trying every possible combination of outputs from the wiring centre, it turned out to be actually quite straight forward. The relay just acted as a switch between its two terminals. So the power feed from the boiler just went in one side and out back to the boiler's enable link.
The upshot was that the wiring centre was talking to the boiler. In addition, the thermostats were talking to the wiring centre. Back at square one in effect. A better, bigger square this time though.
The test switches on the wiring centre confirmed that the pump and actuators worked too which meant it was time to plumb it all together!
Unfortunately this meant draining down the whole heating system in order to solder bits on, queue lots of buckets and spillages everywhere. Eventually a few elbows and a couple of feet of pipe were juggle into place and the propane torch kicked into action to melt the lead into the joints. Filling the system is a matter of plugging a hose into the setup and opening the loops up one at a time. The water flushes through the hundreds of meters of pipe and eventually runs clear and airless. Very much like bleeding a very long radiator.
Then, just like that, underfloor heating became a thing. Beth likes it. A lot.
