Its not lost, its moved from primary circuit to the main house. Nearly all of that heat will be saved come evening when the main house is heated up.
maybe half a second's worth of heat out of a (guess) 1 minute firing for a small rad. 0.75% loss.
again its heat transferred to the main house, and almost all saved come evening time.
they are entirely designed to cope with this.
Clearly for functional control a stat is needed in the room. Even if due to some fault it ran all the time, 15-30w used and turned to heat versus a tiny 1kW rad would only mean that 1.5-3% of the heat is derived from electricity.
170W for my boiler + heat losses in the pipes + extra wear and tear on the heating system.
Is it really worth it when an electric heater will only need to run for a couple of minutes an hour to top up the heat in a small room with other heat producing equipment (PC + printer + lights + ADSL router + power bricks for phones etc and a UPS in my case)
That said, so far this year is turning out quite warm. We've only needed the heating switch on for a couple of days last week. This weekend it is warm again and heating not needed again!
You can do that, but it comes with a giant warning... The portion of the house you use for work becomes liable for capital gains tax when you sell. It's never worth doing if it's your house. In any case, you're saving money and stress by not traveling to work.
Agreed it may also be worth looking for an accounant who specialises in tax matters rather than just "an accountant". BTW you don't get them to do your books just take your books and produce the tax return (and audit if your turnover is high enough).
Another thing to do is go on a "starting in business" course. Check out your local business link or similar organisation. It'll give you a good grounding in what you have to do, what you need to do and the basics involved in running your own business from structure (sole trader, partnership, Co-op, Ltd Co.) to record keeping, VAT (register or not) and so on.
Last time I did this it took 500w continuous. We dont know how insulated the OP's room is. If insulation is a practical option, ie CWI, it would be a better way to spend the money.
If its cast iron, I'd agree. But most of those are gone now. Maybe the OP can look and see if the boiler heat exchanger is a cast iron lump or pressed/bent metal.
I've never been asked what part of my house was used for the allowance I got from the tax man. Given it was mainly for 'paperwork' so done on the computer, in these days of laptops might be tricky?
Be interested to know just how you could zone off one room in a house that simply. Without loads of extra pipework. Do you understand how zoning is achieved?
Nothing to do with the heat exchanger material. More to do with if the boiler will modulate down far enough.
I worked from home for many years, claiming a monthly allowance for one room plus heat and light, and the question of CGT never arose when I sold the house despite the fact that I was using my CGT allowance in full.
I think for most people claiming for a room CGT is a theoretical rather than actual consideration. An accountant would be the person to ask, especially (as I had) an accountant who runs several small businesses as well as an accountancy firm.
I'm sure the o/p now has enough information to make his choice.
If you've ever had a home heated by storage heaters you'd know that isn't the case.
The more you cycle something the shorter it lasts, cars, electronics, whatever. If the ignition circuit of the boiler lasts for say a million hits then the service life will be reduced by repeated over-cycling.
CGT is not payable on a house that is your 'principle domicile' or some such legal bollocks.
Neither is it clear that an office at home whether your principle place of work or not constitutes a commercial premises, for council tax and planning purposes. . Its a pandoras box few people would care to open..
Indeed. If you split the rest of the house up into one zone at the boiler, you'd need to run new pipework to the room in question. Only alternative to that I can think of would be some form of radio linked TRVs on every rad, centrally controlled. But even something like this exists, it wouldn't be cheap to either buy or install.
Depends on layout. Sometimes you can find strategic places to put valves that isolate large sections, but here, its simply not worth it. Need extra heating over and above the PC kit one or to days a winter only.
Exactly. Take this room. Its got about 256 square feet - say 8 square meters, and a window 1.5 sq meters which is the dominant heat loss.
Window is U value about 4 - not double glazed, rest is about 0.2
So total heat loss to outside is something like 6w per degree C for the window plus about 1.35 W per degree C for whats' left of walls and ceiling. So around 7.35 watts per degree C
I like to work about 20 C and in daytime its unusual to go below -5, so that's a heat input of 183 watts once up to temp.
50 watts is me and another 50 for the lights Add in a PC at 75W and its almost there.
So a thermostatically controlled electric heater will get it warmed up fast, and after that its only going to click in now and again to trickle round at 50-100w for the three winter months. Say it does 8 hours at 50W for 5 days a week for 13 weeks.. £2.60 for the winter at 10p a unit. Or replace the light bulbs with incandescents..:-)
So naturally its gonna be cheaper spending £300-1000 quid on valves, thermostats and a short cycling gas boiler innit, just like NT says.. ;-) (I have a larger office that I did work in a couple of years ago It was STILL way cheaper to heat it with a leccy heater than run the CH; I did that year one, year two I used a small fan heater. The problem is all the other stuff you cant be arsed to turn off like the bathroom towel rails, and all the pipes..no matter HOW well lagged the pipes are there is always some stiff inside rooms that loses heat).
As an aside, those in houses that they don't fully use should be aware that not heating parts much if at all is THE best way to reduce the fuel bills.
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