I have lived alone in a three bedroomed association house for 17 years and now there is a plan to replace all the storage heaters with a hot water system. This seems to be initiated by a government directive to make home heating more efficient by using a heat pipe. Any efficiency gain would obviously be lost by transmitting heat using water, rather than direct electricity. I am proposing that the installation of new radiators are fitted behind inward opening doors in the bedrooms and living room, this is all dead wall space and doesn't interfere with existing fitments. The upstairs landing will be housing the electric boiler and would facililitate short runs of pipework to the bedrooms, making a cleaner, more compact job.
My wife, who lives in the next village has had such a conversion, but with gas as the heat source instead of electricity. This keeps breaking down and the (engineer) has to come out to fiddle with the boiler, at least a couple of dozen times now since 2019.
Question: Does the team think that putting the heaters behind the doors would have any detrimental effect on heat distribution. All the storage heaters are under windows at the moment, so immediately lose a huge amount of heat, although double glazed.
Not sure they should be compulsory, I use Storage heaters and have been pleased with them except for the clunky mechanical louvers getting stuck occasionally.
I thought the whole idea was eventually to use a reversible heat pump and then it could be more efficient. Brian
The reason for radiators under windows is that you get a cold downward draft from the window which even in a well heated room makes your feet feel cold and you perceive that the room is much colder than it actually is. Putting a radiator under the window counteracts this downward cold draft.
If the housing association is proposing air sourced heat pumps then be prepared for much larger radiators.
The OP suggested that a "heat pipe" was going to be installed along with an electric boiler so I assume that maybe he was referring to a heat pump (air sourced). He doesn't mention cost but possibly no change from £10k.
British Standard 5449 "(Central Heating) Forced circulation hot water heating systems for domestic premises" recommends: "Wherever practicable individual heat emitters (other than fan convectors) should be located on outside walls preferably beneath windows to offset the cooling effect: it is an advantage to choose an emitter of such a length that it occupies the full width of the window."
My experience is that installers now prefer to put radiators on internal walls ostensibly to reduce heat loss but I think it's actually because it uses a lot less pipe. They also like radiators back-to-back on the same wall for the same reason.
A housing association job in an occupied property will try to be the quickest, easiest, (cheapest) least disruptive job possible.
Storage heaters shouldn't be on external walls because of their far greater heat loss to the back of the heater.
In larger rooms I would push for two radiators where possible.
I had a grant-assisted heating system put in last year and the installers hated me. They wanted a quick easy cheap install with pipes going across the hall ceiling, only to find that all my cornicing has cabling inside it. (Concrete floor and ceiling in a flat.) So they ended up with long 22mm pipe runs round the entire perimeter of the building. I regard this as useful background heat even if the radiators are off.
Also watch them installing them because they seem to default to minmum spacing off the wall to look "neater". I made tnem turn the wall brackets round to space radiators further off the external walls.
Overall the job wasn't what I'd have wanted if I was paying for it all myself but a new gas supply, boiler and 6 rads for £1100 all in was a bargain.
When we moved into this house' over 40 years ago, we found the radiators in the new extension were in the middle of two no-window walls. Basically, nowhere to put furniture such as bookcase or piano. I capped off one feed and extended the other to under the window. Had to do it on the surface since the room has a concrete floor. The rest of the house has suspended wooded floors. [Snip]
The main problem with this scheme is that turning electricity into heat in a resistor is an incredibly *wasteful* way to do it. Heat pump is a much better approach (although they have maintenance issues too much more so than a gas or oil boiler).
The "green" initiative to make all heating electric is conceptually flawed. We barely have enough electricity generating capacity as it is. Turning high grade electricity directly into low grade thermal heat is about the dumbest possible way of doing it. Any other means is preferable in terms of overall end to end energy efficiency.
Add in a few more electric cars and we will be tipped over the edge - particularly in winter when it is cloudy and the wind isn't blowing!
Modern approach would be to put radiators on internal walls so that any heat going through the wall stays in the house. Old style they tended to put them under the windows to mask cold drafts coming down off the windows. Decent double makes quite a difference here.
There is no reason why a correctly installed gas boiler should break down so often. They need one annual maintenance if you play by the book but I know plenty of people who never seem to bother. Likewise for oil fired although that can be a bit tetchy if you get a gale with the wind in the wrong direction.
You will notice some cold drafts coming down from the windows and making the floor level colder. That was the old rationale for putting radiators in front of the windows. The aluminium faced polystyrene foam sheets placed behind the radiators prevent losses through the wall very well.
I think a very high capacity Lithium battery would add to the cost/ effectiveness so it could be charged off peak and the main storage radiator turned on later in the day.
It would also more than double the installation costs and in all probability have a working life in regular use of at most a decade.
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Thermal store is the least bad option if you must do it this way.
UK's big problem right now is not enough electricity generating capacity in winter going forwards. It will only take a calm blocking high and the most of Europe becalmed and we will be having electricity rationing.
Solar is pathetic on grey winters days with the sun barely above the horizon even if the clouds do part for an hour or so.
Heat pipes are amazing. They use phase change (vapor changing back to fluid, releasing the heat of vaporization) as a transport mechanism. Some hobbyist computers have heatpipes in the CPU heatsink, and the transport mechanism is so powerful, it has better thermal conduction properties than an equivalent diameter of solid copper. That's because it is an active transport, whereas solid copper is merely a passive transport.
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Heatpipes don't have to be expensive to work.
They can also "work uphill", if the inside surface of the plumbing is "sintered" and the capillary action that results, allows condensed fluid to travel uphill. A more preferred situation, is for the condensed fluid to flow downhill back to the heat source (storage heater).
You could do this:
In the diagram, the working fluid in the storage heater (water), does not mix with the working fluid in the heatpipe (pure alcohol). The entire heatpipe only has a few teaspoons of alcohol. It does not have, nor need, gallons of alcohol. The transport is vapor phase, and little vapor is needed.
The benefit is, you don't need the storage tank in the upstairs room.
Now, the problem with placing a heatpump on the left hand side of that picture, is the need for winter heating and summer cooling, to work with the same gubbins. In principle, I think you could make it work. But... it might not have the degree of efficiency desired. If I only had to set it up for one season (only for winter heating), I could make it work slightly better.
Just as the general discussion of heatpumps leaves me cold. Heatpumps are a low quality heat source, requiring extraordinary efforts to transfer the heat into a room. Adding a heatpipe to the picture, is just additional aggravation, making a "marginal situation", "more marginal". Stupid even.
The electric storage heater, the electric part is "high quality" heat. When you couple it with the storage part, that degrades the quality a bit. If the water cools down to 40C, what do you do with the remaining heat ? That's not a high enough temp to really heat the room any more.
Heatpipes have a design power limit. For example, if you put more than 200W into the CPU heatsink, all of the working fluid in the pipes remains in the vapor phase, and the nice thermal pumping action stops. The idea then, is to ensure the heatpipe is big enough, for the application, so it doesn't "saturate".
Heatpipes have apparently already been used in air-to-air heat exchangers for R2000 homes. But I haven't seen any pictures of working units of that type, so I don't know what the implementation looks like.
Heat pipe (district heating or heat network) or heat pump? They're very different.
If your 'electric boiler' is going to be on peak rate electricity it may be 'greener' ie use less electricity overall, but it will cost you 3x the price of storage heaters to run and 5x the price of a mains gas boiler.
Some housing associations (or their tenants) have been bitten badly by ill-advised 'eco' heating schemes that are lucrative for the scheme developers.
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Green heating system accused of causing 'fuel poverty'
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A housing association is investigating tenants? high energy bills after becoming the latest to be hit by problems with a particular make of eco-friendly heat pump.
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Families in social housing have said their children have to share baths and wear coats inside due to problems with an eco-friendly heating system. People living in Orwell Housing homes in Ipswich and Tunstall, Suffolk, said the installed air-source heat pump "does not work" and is "expensive". The system is designed to take heat from the air and boost it to a higher temperature by using electricity.
ASHP can be 2-4x as efficient as pure electric heat so, while there are losses in a wet system, they are likely to be overridden by the heat pump efficiency. On the other hand, if your house is poorly insulated the heat pump may not be able to keep up (unless you fit a huge one, which is costly).
(ASHP can struggle in freezing weather, but it's hard not to beat pure electric heat)
It depends on the heating system as to the flow temperature. I'd expect that putting a radiator behind a door is going to be less effective if you leave the door open most of the time. Obviously it'll put heat into the room eventually (nowhere else for it to go), but spend a while heating up the door first.
That sounds like a regular wet system with a gas boiler, as used by millions of people. They don't keep breaking down, which suggests some problem with the (quality of the) installation. Was that fitted by the same HA?
It's not so much a temperature gradient across the room as air ciculation. The windows, double or single glazed, will cool the air this becomes more dense and sinks drawing warmer air down. This sets up a circulation, the bottomm line being your feet are in a cold draft.
Decent curtains outside the window reveal and tucked behind the top of the radiator keep the warm air in and any circulation within the reveal. Even better if you can fit another set of curtains adjacent to the windows.
Behind doors strikes me as a really bad place for a radiator. Are doors habitually left open or closed? Open is going to restrict how much heat the raditor can effectively transfer to the room.
Will there be enough space for a radiator to fit without fouling the door when it is open?.
Doors tend to be opposite windows, this will enhance the circulation due to the window cooling effect.
You should tell the housing association to spend the money on better insulation and more modern storage heaters, which is *FAR* more cost effective.
Fitting a new wet radiator system, heated by electricity to an existing (not perticularly new) property could only be dreamed up by a completely clueless greenie numpty. An utterly expensive folly, only made possible by the fact that they are spending other peoples taxes.
It should have a construction slab about 5 inches thick, topped with about 80mm of aerated screed which is easier to 'polish' to give a flat surface. You can (or should have been) able to dig a channel through the screed without a massive amount of effort.
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