29/08/2026
One room roasting, another freezing? Nine times out of ten nothing is broken. Your heating controls are just fighting each other.
Your heating works in layers. The programmer decides when it runs, and that is all it does, it has no idea how warm the house is. The room thermostat measures air temperature and tells the boiler when to stop. TRVs, the valves with numbered dials on your radiators, trim each individual room. Zoning splits upstairs from downstairs so they can run separately.
Three things we see constantly:
Fitting a TRV to the radiator in the same room as the thermostat. They then compete. The TRV shuts the radiator down as the room warms, so the thermostat never quite hits its target and keeps the boiler running for the whole house. That radiator should have no TRV, or its head left fully open.
Treating TRV numbers as degrees. They are not. They are relative settings and they differ between makes. Turning it to five does not make the radiator hotter, it just keeps the valve open until the room is warmer. Radiators run at whatever temperature the boiler sends out.
A seized head. Very common on valves nobody has touched in years. The pin underneath sticks and the radiator is stuck on or stuck off no matter what the dial says. That is often the entire reason one room never warms up.
And the big one: turning the thermostat up does not heat your house any faster. The boiler makes heat at the same rate whatever you set it to. A higher number just means it runs for longer and uses more gas.
Rooms heating unevenly? Call us on 07960 042563.
Read more: https://manchestergasandheating.co.uk/heating-controls-explained-trvs-zones-and-getting-your-system-to-behave/