Heating in flats with concrete floors

[Giles Hammond]

Hello,

I am new to this group and have seen some posts in the past relating to putting central heating into flats with concrete floors. I have a couple of questions relating to this topic which I hope you can help me with. I have recently bought a ground floor maisonette with two bedrooms. The floor is concrete and at the moment I am not sure if it belongs to the leaseholder? There is a 20 year old warm air (Johnson and Starley) heating system but the ducts only go into the living room and hallway. The two bedrooms and bathroom come off the hallway. I was thinking of a couple of solutions.

(1) I have seen that these warm air systems work well (maybe with an upgrade) but there are no vents into the bedrooms. I am guessing it is a pretty big job to run good size vents into these rooms as I would need to cross the hallway in some way? Is this a solution worth considering? (2) Going for a more traditional wet heating solution would still require pipes to be taken around the house. I was not too enthusiastic about digging channels in the floor and was wondering whether anyone had any comments on the use of small bore high level pipes with vertical feeds to radiators. Presumably the pipes could be hidden either in a false ceiling or in coving around the edge of the wall. I have also seen that some modern heating solutiions utilise plastic pipes, is this a bad idea?

Thank you very much for your time in looking at this query,

regards, Giles

[Doctor Drivel]

If you can get ducts to the rooms do it. You could put a slow moving fan in the bedroom grill pulling in air from the hot hall switched by a room stat. The way they worked was to fan air to the rooms by ducts and the air "returns" to be re-heated via the hall. Have you got it right?

Leave the J&S unit and install a combi and heat only the unheated rooms. The combi will then give you instant hot water and eliminate a cylinder (assuming you have one). You need DHW of some sort , so the combi will do that and give the rads for free (sort of)

It must be a cheapo system if the bedrooms are not heated. These systems gave forced air a bad name.

[Tony Bryer]

A friend of mine has a house like this. His solution - a long time ago now - was to replace the warm air burner part of the system with a heat exchanger fed from a normal wall mounted boiler. Apparently this was a quite a standard retrofit and the parts were all readily available but I don't know the details.

[Owain]

It is certainly possible to run the main flow and return at high level and use microbore to drop down to individual rads. Although the traditional and in some ways the best position for rads is below windows, if you move rads to the interior walls of the flat you may be able to significantly reduce the amount of pipework involved. If all the rads are on hall-adjoiining walls it might be possible to put all the pipework on the hall ceiling and have a false ceiling below to conceal the gubbins - an opportunity to add the now-obligatory recessed downlighters too :-)

On the other hand, having rads by windows allows the pipe drops to be concealed behind long curtains.

If the pipes are going to be visible, copper is more rigid and therefore neater. Microbore copper can also be concealed in plastic electrical-style trunking.

Owain

[Richard Faulkner]

In message , Giles Hammond writes

I hope not - just had a system fitted where all the pipes are plastic, and hidden above the ceiling/behind the plasterboard!