My heating system

We have a quite odd heating system in our house. It consists of roughly 10 series connected convectors. Neither one has a valve. There are two places with T junctions.
If you want to temper the heat in one section, you have to close the top of the convector enclosure to prevent warm air from leaving the convector casing.

The main advantage of this convector system is that it supplies hot air in a rapid pace. As soon as the water in the convectors exceeds 50°C, the warm air starts to spill from the convectors and you immediately feel a warm, dry heat filling the rooms.

The heaters are just twin anti-parallel metal pipes with lots of thin heat exchanger plates welded to the exteriors. The plates are close to 1 mm thick and 2 to 3 mm apart.

My temperature sensors

My oldest and most reliable temperature sensor is a mercury filled laboratory thermometer. It has a 0.5° C scale and with some trickery can be read to 0.25°. Operation is simple: just keep it in or close to what you want to measure the temperature of and wait for 10 seconds (liquid) or a few minutes (gases) so that the mercury can expand fully.

At Conrad, I bought some affordable digital thermometers around 1994 (picture above). One died recently but the other one is still going strong. The NTC sensor has been extended with a 20 cm cable so I can measure the temperature of 'remote' places. The thermometer has been checked against the mercury filled lab thermometer and it is astonishingly accurate: maximal 0.2° C difference, given enough time to have the temperature settled around the sensor.

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