The Central Heating Scheduler Is Fundamentally Flawed
The planner in the central heating system is practically useless in its current form. Let’s take a closer look at the major design flaws and mistakes made by the developers.
At first glance, everything in the image above seems fine. However, the description is misleading because the scheduler does not work as users would reasonably expect.
The main problem is that the scheduler does not allow different heating schedules for individual days of the week. Instead, it forces users to apply the same combination of heating periods from Monday to Sunday, as shown in the image. This is a serious limitation that makes the planner unsuitable for many real-world heating scenarios.
My required heating schedule
Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday:
I need the heating system to maintain a constant temperature of 10°C throughout the entire day, from 00:00 to 24:00.
Unfortunately, this cannot be configured correctly using the current planner. This basic scheduling requirement should be supported, but it simply doesn’t work as expected.
Wednesday and Thursday:
I need a different schedule for these two days:
- 00:00–22:00: Maintain a temperature of 10°C.
- 22:00–00:00: Increase the temperature to 21°C.
This schedule should be straightforward to configure. However, the planner’s limitations make it unnecessarily difficult or impossible to implement the required combination correctly.
The problem with the current implementation
The only workaround appears to be an incorrect scheduling configuration that cannot properly represent the different heating requirements for each day.
The scheduler should allow users to configure independent daily schedules, or at the very least, combine different schedules for selected days of the week. For example, one schedule should be applicable to Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, while a different schedule should apply to Wednesday and Thursday.
How it should work
The correct solution should allow me to maintain 10°C all day on five days of the week, while automatically switching to 21°C between 22:00 and midnight on Wednesday and Thursday.
This is a basic and entirely reasonable requirement for a central heating scheduler.
Anti-cycling protection
The anti-cycling protection is unusable; I managed to bypass it. All I had to do was manually change the digits. Besides, this is not the right way to implement it.
The simplest solution is to restore all the digits and add a setting that allows the user to configure a fixed delay, in minutes, before heating can be turned on again after it has been switched off.
Please fix this limitation. A heating planner should provide flexible, day-specific scheduling rather than forcing users to work around an unnecessarily restrictive design. In the future, please consult someone who actually knows how this should work, such as me or any qualified heating technician.
