Fellow subredditors,
I recently moved to the new apartment and I have this kind of heater gauge on my all apartment heaters. (Please open link for image) Can someone please tell me how to read it? As in what does it indicate? Also, I rarely use heating since moving as new apartment remains warm most of the time so I am not sure where to set my heater dial. I currently set them to defreeze all the time and only change if I need to use heating. Is it normal or will it consume too much energy. I want to be careful as heating costs are getting very expensive. I live in Baden-Württemberg if it helps.
[Heater](https://imgur.com/a/Bul03yI)
3 comments
this is old method for measuring how much you use he heating, just leave it aline
Part (usually 50%) of the heating cost of your house is shared between the tenants according to the floor area, the other half by the energy used. To calculate this second half, the radiators are equipped with those thingies (called Heizkostenverteiler).
Inside there are two little tubes with liquid – one is sealed, from last year, as reference. The other is open so the liquid can evaporate. The more you use the radiator, the faster the evaporation.
The units on the scale are just that: units which on their own down tell much. That’s where the magic of the annual Heizkostenabrechnung kicks in. The unit is multiplied with a factor representing the individual radiator size, and all those numbers added up – for the entire building and for every apartment.
Let’s say the total heating of the house cost € 40,000. € 20,000 is shared via apartment size, and € 20,000 using those numbers. The total area if the house is 2,000 sqm, your apartment has 50 sqm – your share of the first half of the cost is € 500
Total units from all radiators is 1,000, for your radiators it’s 20 – your share of the second half is € 400, your total heating bill will be € 900.
If you compare the liquid levels in those tubes near the end of the billing period, you get a vague idea if you used more or less than last year.
You should not let the room temperature go below 17 or 18 degrees, or you might get mold problems due to condesating moisture on cold surfaces.
Someone else already gave you an excellent answer on the tube gauge thingy. So let me answer the other part of your question:
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>I currently set them to defreeze all the time and only change if I need to use heating. Is it normal or will it consume too much energy.
Those dials are thermostats. So you can basically set them to a certain temperature and forget about them. If the room gets warm enough, they will just turn off by themselves. And obviously they are much more efficient at reacting to temperature differences than you are when changing the temperature manually. So chances are your “turn up the heating when you feel cold, turn it off as soon as you feel warm” approach uses more energy than if you just set the thermostat to a certain temperature you feel comfy at and let it do its thing.
It depends a little on the manufacturer and the exact way the heater is built into the room* but usually a 3 on the thermostat represents about 20 degrees room temperature. So that’s a good place to start. Though it can vary. For example on my heaters, for whatever reason, 3 seems to mean more like 24 degrees room temperature, so I usually only keep mine at 2 or so…
The only times you might have to manually regulate the heat is at night but that also depends. In lots of buildings the temperature is automatically lowered between 10pm and 6am or whatever. So you might not even have to do anything. Otherwise I would recommend turning the heater down a few degrees at night. But as the other person already said, best not much lower than 17 degrees or so. Not just because of mould but also because 17 degrees tends to be the sweet spot that’s low enough to save some energy but still high enough that you don’t waste too much energy heating the room up again in the morning.
* the temperature is measured right at the dial/valve. So for example if the radiator is crammed under a large window sill in a corner or whatever and the dial faces the wall, then it’s very well possible that the nook the radiator is in will be warm enough to shut the valve while the rest of the room isn’t warm yet. In that case you might have to set the radiator temperature to a higher temperature than you want the actual room temperature to be, because only when that nook reaches that higher temperature will the room be at the temperature you actually want… That’s also the reason they don’t put temperatures on the dial but just numbers. Because a 3 on the dial might mean something very different in different rooms.