No thermostat used to be quite common, relying on the boilerstat to turn the system off. Bleedin' inefficient, of course, but cheaper for the builder/installer and when oil was cheap nobody seemed to mind it too much (or didn't realise they'd been bilked).
Yes, even buying a reel I cannot get the price below GBP7/metre.
I've bought some for under a portacabin, cw frostsat, but we've got a 40m length of 28mm blue pipe in trunking between buildings that I'm worried about. BN Thermic are in Crawley and I've been wondering about asking them if I could use the stuff inside the pipe with a termination coming out of a Plasson Tee.
AJH
In principle, there's nothing to stop you using some heatproof flex and regulating a LV current down it sufficient to raise conductor temperature, but well within the insulation specs. Somebody here posted such a thing last winter, but I unrecall the details.
Might be a problem when I come to sell my house?
MM
Unlikely...
No. The only thing people care about at that point are non-conforming structural alterations.
It's probably easy to have it corrected. You need to find an electrician who is familiar with heating controls.
I made one for the condensate pipework from a dehumidifier many years ago. It used sleeved constantin resistance wire actually threaded inside the pipe. That would also work well for a condensing boiler.
Around 30 years ago, I bought a reel of electric blanket heater wire from Proops. That would also be ideal, if you can find anything similar nowadays.
Interesting.
The thing about this stuff is that is two conductors with a resistance material between them, so the power consumption per unit length is independent of the length. Its temperature coefficient is such that its resistance increases faster as the temperature rises.
AJH
I just used a froststat, positioned outdoors near the pipework.
aters appear to need an extra thermostat).
I've finally purchased a tube heater. 120W 2ft long white, from Argos. This is for the loft. The instruction sheet confirms that it is suitable for the loft (IPX4 rating). In addition to the instruction sheet, is there anything I need to be aware of when mounting it tomorrow (can't do it now as I'm knackered after traipsing around Boston for three hours).
MM
You can heat a 2.5x2x2.4m box room with 1.2x1m single glazing to "just above cold" with a 120W tube heater... but it has 50mm Celotex on the walls... 270mm loft insulation... and EPDM draught excluder fitted... and the room below is heated.
A loft usually has a gale blowing through the tiles (& sarking felt) and is separated from the heated house by a good thickness of insulation. So utterly impossible to heat.
What you could do is build an enclosure above any water tank & piping, insulation on top of that, and remove any insulation beneath so heat from the house warms it. Then fit a 120W tube heater somewhere in that with a frost thermostat which is set to turn on at (say) 5oC. Heating a loft as a body of air is a non-starter unless the underside of the room has 100mm Celotex on it (correctly ventilated above).
Tube heater IP rating is x4 so splashproof, should be fine in a loft unless it is stood in water (which you do not want anyway!).
But if its anything like my loft its a basic wind tunnel, so it would never be able to cope. You really need to put insulation over the pipe but keep it open to the room below. Brian
The pipes are insulated, but I've removed ~some~ of the loft insulation (the orange woolly stuff) around the tank so that more heat can permeate upwards. I leave the loft hatch open for the duration and open the bedroom doors so that heat from the rads will also trickle up. Last December was a LOT colder, but the temperature in the loft just held at about 4 deg C at its minimum. The tube heater is just an additional source of heat, though admittedly not a lot! I tested it this afternoon in a very cold bedroom and it raised the temp by 1 deg in one hour with the door closed.
MM
With a properly vented loft I fear you are wasting your time and money. The only thing I would rely on would be heating tape under thick insulation if I really thought pipes were going to freeze.
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