I live in a 75 yr old two story house with an oil fired boiler/furnace and cast iron rads. Its only about 1600 square living space so its not huge, but I was wondering if it would be more efficient to stop making big swings in the thermostat. Heres our normal routine. 62 all night and some of the day hours until my wife comes home around 3 pm, then she sets it up to about 68-70 until we go to bed at 9-10 oclock. It goes back down to 62 at that point. My question is that it takes about two hours of burning oil and circulating to get the temp raised that six degrees. Is that more efficient then keeping the temp a bit higher all day long so it doesnt have to work as hard later? Another question is that I have a new unused gas furnace in my attic that is two years old and it was retrofitted along with my airhandler when we had AC installed. I would like to convert to natural gas at some point but wondering if the payoff would be worth it and if forced hot air from ceiling registers would be better heat then my cast iron rads(I know thats a matter of opinion) I already have an old gas line coming into my basement from the street because it appears someone many years ago converted back to oil, but I would have to pipe gas to the furnace in the attic and I would still need a hot water heater unless I just kept my boiler furnace and ran two systems. Does this sound rediculous or what? The other bonus is that if I got rid of my rads, I could free up a little more floor space. 1600 sq. is not that big, but it works for us.

Hi, I've done some work on my oil fired burner "Williamson OWT-3" with a Hot Water Coil providing domestic hot water. I know the dials on the aquastat are not dead accurate, and keeping in mind the HIGH and LOW settings are suppose to be a minimum of 20F difference... HOW do I know they are? - I set HIGH/180F by using the aquastat dial to make the burner shut off when the boiler TEMP is 180F. The dial on the aquastat says 140F Pretty far off but i won't make the assumption that i can just set the LOW to 120F on the dial thinking it's really 160F...CAN I? SO, to set the aquastat LOW/160F, should i depend on the aquastat dial markings, or adjust wherever the boiler fires up when there is no heat call? I've searched about this but cannot find any related info about how to adjust when the aquastat dials cannot be believed. Would appreciate some suggestions on what to do here!