alpha climatic controller

bcr5784 · Apr 10, 2012

I have just installed an Alpha Intec 18s (system) boiler with their climatic programmable modulating boiler energy manager (really snappy name...). On the face of it, it looks really clever, combining a two channel programmer with sophisticated control of boiler flow temperature in response to outside and inside air temperature and simple change of hot water temperature with no need to fiddle with thermostats. Terrific! Well ... not quite. Unfortunately it seems that although you can set up to 4 hot water periods on each day there is no way to override them without reprogramming the daily schedule. Yes I really do mean that!. So if, as a working couple, you choose to have hot water heated morning and evening during the week, should you have a holiday you have no way (at least no obvious one) of overriding that during the day. In my case it's perfectly feasible most days to heat the hot water just once in the morning. But I'm knackered if I have some unusual extra hot water needs in the day. This seems to me ridiculous - but conversations with Alpha suggest that it really is the case. Anyone found a way around it? You can do it by switching off the boiler, disconnecting the energy manager controlling the boiler (in the garage in my case) via its front panel controls and then reversing the process 5 or 10 minutes later - but that would take longer than reprogramming the hot water schedule.

I could run the hot water from morning til night daily - but I know that is highly inefficient and (for me) just about doubles the gas consumption during the summer months even though my tank and pipes are very well lagged. Given that Alpha make great play (understandably) of their efficiency this seems a big drop-off.

Or am I missing a trick?

:6:

Alpha man · Apr 11, 2012

LOL, remove it and just use conventional controls!!!

bcr5784 · Apr 12, 2012

Alpha man said:
LOL, remove it and just use conventional controls!!!

Rather defeats the object of the exercise - I took OFF conventional controls to make running the boiler more efficient (and also make the connections to the boiler considerably simpler). I could run hot water continuously if I wasn't bothered about efficiency - or I could put some sophisticated override on the hot water - but no-one but me would understand the wiring or how to use it.

bcr5784 · Apr 13, 2012

I've actually found a solution! Or at least a work around. If you adjust the requested hot water temperature (either up or down - or even up/down and returning to the original value) the hot water effectively goes into manual "on" mode. From then on the controller will maintain the specified hot water temperature until the Auto button is pressed - when it returns to it's previous state. You do have to press Auto again to get the HEATING out of manual mode. Not actually ideal, intuitively natural, or documented in the installations and user instructions - but actually quite workable in practice.

I find it astonishing that Alpha technical guys don't actually seem to be aware of the drop-off they have made - or the fact that there is a workaround.

This workaround only works in Winter mode, not Summer (hot water only) mode - but again, not intuitively natural but easy to circumvent.