I have almost finished building a ground floor utility room and adjoining shower room on a concrete base. I was thinking about installing cable underfloor heating, but have no experience of it and neither do I know anyone who has. So, I am wondering if it will be suitable and adequate for these two rooms which, hopefully, won't have to have rads. Many thanks for any advice.
I'm just about to do this in our kitchen. I got mine from who were very helpful, and have a nice range of products.
There's really not much to it - you lay the cable, then tile on top.
One of my relatives installed it in a well insulated bathroom of fairly large floor area and it is sufficient, but can't make the bathroom hot, if you understand what I mean. You should work out the likely heat loss and work out the floor area and how many watts you can get out, if the wattage is enough there is no problem, if it is borderline you could put in a couple of heated towel rails to back up the warmth.
Its horrendously expensive unless you run it on night rates.
To be effective at that, you need to have a very large floor mass.
And lots of insulation.
Otherwise stick to rads. or wet UFH.
You will need rads I am sure unless the rooms are tiny. Wickes / screwfix standard kits only make the tiles warm to the feet and not much else. Don't forget the heat has to pass through the floor tiles / covering before the room can be heated.
Jen
Lots to think about. Thanks for all the replies.
I used to work in an office that had electric underfloor heating. It was a pain.
It would take 3 days to reach temperature and the same time to cool down.
Either the staff would switch on the electric blow heaters or have the windows open trying to cool down.
Graham
My first adventures in controlling mine resulted in similar effects. She would 'turn it up' because it was cold, and 'open the windows' because it was hot.
The last office I worked in (radiators) suffered from the same thing, because it appears that the majority of people do NOT understand what a thermostat is.
They turn it up because they are cold, and even more up because they are still cold 5 minutes later, as if it were a gas fire. And open the windows as if it were a hot day.
Once statted correctly - about 22 degrees - my UFH stabilizes after about 5 hours. The floor ranges from cool to quite warm depending on the outside temperature, and the mass of it stabilizes winter temperatures very well as the sun goes up and down etc.
Because of the long warm up period, if I time it at all (spring autumn) I tend to put it on a couple of hours before sunset, and run till midnight. In winter its 24x7. Its less innefficient than you might expect, because bedrooms above it need far less heating anyway.
That can be the case with wet UFH too.
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