Underfloor Heating

[Alan]

Hi all, I am in the process of doing up our newly bought house. At the moment I have removed all the old carpets and nails and we are now going to decide on the heating system.

The whole house and hallways and stairs are floorboards...some very old and some very recent.

We had hoped to keep the floorboards just as they are with some staining and finally a good sanding down. Its an old house from 1873.

Is there a suitable electric underfloor heating system designed to be fitted under neath existing floorboards? This would of course involve some joist channelling on my part but as the house is empty at the moment....that does not pose a problem. I am more than capable of lifting all the floorboards myself.

Most of the systems I have seen are for either mats, or for laminated floors, or for tiled floors.

Regards Alan

[Stuart]

I looked into underfloor heating quite a bit before installing my own, and the general consensus was that electric is okay for consevatories or small extensions, but would be far too expensive to run for a whole house. I used a water system from an oil fired boiler for all 3 floors of my house, and to be honest i'm not too sure about it. When you get the temperature right its fantastic, a much better kind of heat than radiators somehow, but you have to pre-think when you want the heat on and off by about 3 hours, and if its too warm theres not much you can do about it apart from open the windows. Cheers, Stuart