Each electric underfloor heating system requires a digital thermostat to operate it, there are quite a few suppliers around today and all offering different features.
We choose to supply AUBE thermostats, these are designed in Canada, and are one of the best thermostats on the market today.
What makes an underfloor heating thermostat different to your standard central heating stat is all the electric runs through the stat to the underfloor heating cables, by doing this the thermostat can control the amount of electric to the cables and therefore maintain a constant temperature, by gathering the information via the floor sensor.
These thermostats have incorporated into them what’s called a PIA, this stands for Proportional Integral Adaptive and what this little fella does is determines the heating cycles by analyzing the history of the temperature behaviour in the room, it also sends a signal down the heating cable and by timing its response it can work out how long to heat for on the next cycle, this then enables it to work out how much power is required to hold it at the temperature you set it to.
The AUBE thermostat also comes equipped with an on-off twice a day – seven day timer.
Built into the thermostat is a function known as E.S this is Early Start and what it does is it turns the heating on early to be warm for a specified time, instead of you programming it to turn on an hour earlier to be it will calculate how long it will take to warm up and turn itself on, so if you set the heating to come on at 8am it would turn on, say ,an hour earlier and be warm for you at 8am, to activate this function you need to turn the electric off to the thermostat, remove the faceplate by unscrewing the little screw underneath and flick the tiny switch on the rear.
The best way to programme the timer is to firstly run the system for a week or two until you know what is a comfortable day time temperature for you. When you know what that is you’re ready to programme the timer.
1) – In manual mode (with the little hand pointing).
2) – Set the day and time if you haven’t already done so by using the top left hand corner buttons.
3) - Next set the “set points” the sun and the moon, these are the temperature set points that you would like the heating system to warm up to and then cool down to when its not in use, if these are relatively close together then it wont take a long time to warm-up. In this example i am going to use the sun setting at 25d and the moon at 20d, to do this simply use the arrow buttons on the bottom right hand corner, press it up or down and then hold you finger on the sun for a moment, then do the same for the moon – it should now be set, you can check this by pressing the sun and moon and check they go to 25 then 20d, the screen will then fall back to the ambient temperature.
4) –To set the timer its easier to set all the days of the week in one go – so press PGM and it should come up with “1” and a little guy walking out of the house, press the day button until the days of the week are displayed – yep? Ok now set the time you want it to come on, in my case 6am, then press PGM, number 2 should come on with the little guy coming home and the moon showing is the time you want it to go off, I’d like mine to turn off at 9am, press PGM, do the same for 3 and 4, in my example I would set 3 to come on at 17.30 and off at 22pm.
5) – Once you have done this the whole timer is set to do that all week – now in my house at the weekend I want it on all day, so this is easy to do, select Saturday by pressing the day button then keep pressing PGM until you get to number 1 again, set the time you want it on, so 8pm for me, press PGM and then set number 2 to the time you want to turn it off, I would set this to 10pm, and then for 3 and 4 press “clear” and then PGM, this clears out the times to come on again later in the day.
6) - then finaly press Mode until th elittle clock is displayed, then depending on what time of day it is either the sun or the moon will b eon the dispay, this can take a moment or two to sort itself out.
So just to recap – make sure you press PGM after each setting and if you only want it to turn on once a day, make the time between 1 and 2 as far apart as you need, don’t use 3 and 4! - And the good news these have a built in battery back-up - hurray no re-programming after a power cut!
When you look at the stat you may notice the power bars in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, the floor is only ever using electric when these bars are displayed, each bar is 20%, so five bars is full power - 2 bars is 40%, the system can still display bars even when the timer shows the moon setting.
