I have bought a 3 bed house built in about 1930. It has just one gas fire in the living room with a back boiler feeding a water tank. No other heating. I intend to rip all this out and want to have laminate floor downstairs and carpet upstairs.
Can I use electric underfloor heating for the whole house or even just downstairs?
Help please, as I have read conflicting reports of running costs and insulation.
Thanks,
Jim
snipped-for-privacy@tiscali.co.uk wrote on 11/02/2006 :
I'm not an expert on this, however someone is bound to correct me if I get anything wrong :-)
Electric underfloor heating tended to be installed in new builds which had solid floors and back in the 1960's. It was never used on suspended wooden floors. These days it tends to be used only for small areas, like bathrooms and wet rooms, rather than whole house heating. It has always been a rather expensive way to provide heating and is not very responsive to changes in the weather.
Why can't you use gas or oil?
Good insulation is important whichever form of heating you choose.
Electrical heating is about twice as expensive as fuel heating irrespective of what form it takes.
The issues with not using insulation on a floor with UFH are basically that you may lose up to 50% of the heat before it gets into the room Making it 4 times as expensive...and worse, you may need to run it SO hot that it actually damages the screed. Or else it never heats the room
With UFH you *have* to do the job properly - otherwise stick to rads.
done well its the best there is.
Done badly its an expensive waste of time.
I would only contemplate it as part of a total gut and refurbish - i.e. in an attempt to get the house fully up to modern specs on insulation by re-laying the floors downstairs, adding wall insulation and DG windows, plus draught sealing all doors and sorting out loft insulation.
Tacked on a poorly insulated structure you will regret it.
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