Make HKV adjustable and keep an eye on power consumption

Hello,

we have been living in the new house for almost 3 years and are fundamentally satisfied with many things. Heating and ventilation also do not make us uneasy, but there are a few points that I would do differently now. Maybe we can also achieve the same by making some modifications here and there.

Facts:
(Erdwärme/Tiefenbohrung) heat pump
27 heating circuits in 4 heating circuit distributors on 4 floors
Distances of all pipes are equal and circuits are about the same length
The rooms all have 2 heating circuits and the bathrooms each have 1 (here, a wall heating may possibly be connected in the future)
Originally, everything was controlled with room thermostats and 27 control valves. I tried to do a hydraulic balancing here, removing the control valves and thermostats.

Details:
In the basement, besides 3 heated rooms, there is the heated utility room (HAR)
On one floor there is a large common room + hallway and guest WC
On 2 floors there is each 1 bathroom and 2 or 3 small rooms

Problem:
This works well but I have to adjust things on the heating circuit distributors several times a year. For example, turning the basement completely down or up, closing the bathroom completely and turning the bedroom fully on (when I switch from heating to cooling) - but this is bearable since all heating circuits in the house are now manually adjusted and since I have double heating circuits in the rooms compared to the bathroom, I have to turn the rooms down significantly and still hardly get the bathroom temperatures into a comfortable range. Otherwise, I would have to raise the heating temperatures and then turn the other rooms down even more, which is hardly possible.

Ideally, I would like to switch between all rooms closed + bathrooms on vs. all rooms on and bathrooms closed (or also on, if the lower temperature does not already "cool" the bathrooms again) with as few control valves as possible. Besides the consumption of the control valves, there are the acquisition costs of the control valves to consider, since I currently only have 2W NC valves lying around. I would have to open them so often that I consider this uneconomical.

Option 1

In the current picture, you see 1 of 4 heating circuit distributors. The bathroom has a "doubling" for a prospective connection of a wall heating. I am now thinking of operating each room (blue boxes) with such a doubling to only need one control valve per room. Also, the circulation pump can only manage about half the flow when everything is open anyway, so I might as well limit the flow that way?!

Bathroom still on one circuit and the wall heating in the future on a separate circuit instead of connected to the bathroom circuit.

The hallway on its own circuit, permanently minimally open without a control valve.

Option 2

I would find it even better to connect the bathroom(s) completely in the heating circuit distributor to a separate manifold and equip it with a separate control valve and to make the current heating circuit distributor also closable with a separate control valve (green). But that surely is not possible, right?

I lack the specific knowledge regarding general controllability. But I think it should be possible. You probably need a small server and an actuator that is compatible with the control drives.

Regarding the wall heaters, what do you mean by that? A proper wall heating with heating loops in the wall (similar to underfloor heating) or a towel radiator. If you mean a towel radiator, better not connect it to the hydraulics, but rather use an electric one (either with a heating cartridge or an IR panel).

The server is here and I am buying control valves. I have smart thermostats in all rooms. The issue is settled!

I am specifically concerned about the conversion for the HVAC.
Which of the options is possible and which is cheaper?

By the way: if I ever have a heating system installed in a house again, I think I will have a second circuit laid from the heating for the bathrooms on each floor right away.

EDIT: so concretely:

[*
is it possible to replace the shut-off valves for supply and return with a control valve so that I can basically turn off the entire HKV smart?
[LIST=1]
[*]is it possible to branch off a line for the bathroom in the HKV BEFORE this control valve of the entire HVK and operate it with a separate control valve?


[*]is it possible to install such a "switch" for the rooms like with the bathroom circuit? can I do it myself by turning off the supply and return and then installing it or will the heating water flow back at me?

It is called heating circuit distributor!

1. sure, motorized ball valve (not solenoid valve!) and off we go
1.1 if your heat generator can handle the increased heating load, why not
2. see 1.1, at some point the design probably no longer fits and yes, of course broth comes out, as much as is in that pipe segment

Whether you can do that, you have to know. The whole construct doesn’t seem particularly well thought out to me.

Heater cost distributor was probably the autocorrect. Thank you very much for the tip about the motorized ball valve, that already helps a lot. The heat pump currently doesn't run for 12 hours even at -15 degrees. There is still plenty of room. Basically, I just want to turn on the heat pump twice a day to "flush" only the two bathrooms.

A quick summary of what I have tried so far and what has worked well:

1. (this is how we bought it) On each heating circuit a 2W NC control valve (27 pieces) with 14 thermostats in the house that controlled these actuators. Because of this, I probably used around 300 kWh per year for controlling the heating circuits. That increases the annual house electricity consumption of 1500 kWh by 20%. Not to mention that the sluggish system limited the settings greatly, the summer-winter time change was a nightmare, and the settings on the heater were not always well compatible with those of the thermostats. In short: the system's annual performance factor suffered greatly from this. To achieve 2 degrees more in the bathroom than in other rooms still required a significantly higher return temperature, and that all day long – or it was difficult to adjust.

2. All control valves turned off and all individual heating circuits fully open and set manually. The annual performance factor is now above 5. Saved 300 kWh. For this, I have to live with adjusting the heater control valve 2-4 times a year and naturally can’t respond well to spontaneous changes.

Current plan in the hope that it seems a bit more thought-through: Now I basically want the same but twice a day to turn off the entire heating control valve and only open the two heating circuits of the bathrooms and at the same time turn up the return flow. Afterwards, the bathrooms close again and the other heating circuits open again. Since I want to work with microcontrollers in the heating control valve anyway, I will probably also install mostly NO control valves on the heating circuits, which I can also close, for example, in case of excessive heating by the sun. Since all the room thermostats are running via Home Assistant anyway, controlling this is no problem. I just need the best way to achieve maximum valve control success with as few structural changes as possible. Since almost all heating circuits currently run at about 1/4 flow, I can probably also connect two from one room together to one heating control valve connection and save another control valve. After all, I will never close only one heating circuit out of two in one room, right?!