Independant heat for one room in the house

An infra-red heater such as the ones with a Philips Ruby lamp (e.g. 150 watt) is incredibly effective. There are lamps with similar effect which emit no visible light - but I think they are more expensive.

This is a crap out-of-date link to a Lidl product:

Google "single gas wall heaters".

They have helped in your circumstances if the site is ok for fitting.

Can understand that. CH should be fit, set and forget IMHO.

That is an option but the layout of pipe work might not make that a straight forward one.

Poo, that was going to be my suggestion as you are messing about with the fire place anyway. Also a backup heat source in the event of power cuts etc but you already have woodburner so that hook isn't very strong either. Surprised you need it lit now, haven't lit ours since the 20th as it's been warm enough with the CH just kicking in for 20 mins when the set point goes from 18.5 to 20 for the evening.

Lot of lag in UFH, might be OK if you use the room a lot so can leave it on. Otherwise you are heating a room from a relatively expensive source for no good reason.

Think I'd go for a reasonable sized electric oil filled radiator with thermostat. What are the walls? Would adding a bit of insulation to the inside of the exterior walls be possible?

I think insulation is probably the best option to start with, but frankly, if its literally for the couple of weeks between 'no central heating' and 'full central heating' why not just put in a dirt cheap electric heater that will top that room up for the few week of the year that it needs it?

Of course if you have TRVS and a main thermostat you can do as I do, and run the CH anyway,. in the full knowledge that it will barely be heating more than just the one room anyway.

They vary widely in efficiency; a glass fronted room heater may be 70-80% efficient or more; a Decorative Flame Effect 'bed of coals' might only be 25% efficient.

Claims 89% efficiency

Owain

If the plumbing implications are not too horrific, I'd go for a separate CH zone.

Get a free standing radiant electric heater. Cheap to buy and easy to install and use. You'll feel the warmth. One that oscillates on its stand may be an improvement.

Edgar

Get some insulation in. Look at your draught proofing. Astonishing you need any heat in this weather. You house must be leaking heat like a sieve. Conventional woodburners (and gas fires) are somewhat counter productive as they must draw cold air into the room. This may be your major problem, maybe it's coming in via the lounge. You can get room sealed gas heaters and fires for a single room, they need regular maintenance (as with all gas appliances.) It would be good if your house could be surveyed with a thermal image camera. (Cold weather job)

You can get room sealed wood burners too.

If you are lifting the floor, you might consider installing a solid floor (+wet UFH?) with 150 or 200mm insulation below. Wet UFH makes your boiler more efficient. It's quite difficult insulating below a suspended floor, especially if there's not a lot of space below.

It all might seem a lot of trouble/expense but you are doing it for tomorrows energy prices, not todays

[This answer covers several helpful posts]

Rear rooms of the house are kept toasty normally just by thermal gain.

The fire was first lit in anger when we had the cool snap a week or so back. Not really needed - I'm just playing and checking out how well the wood stock has dried out. Plus the cats love it being in over night.

The CH would probably not kick in because the rest of the house is at least 20C - if the heating was turned on. If we were going down that route we'd turn the rest of the house off and put the thermostat in the lounge.

In this row of houses the lounges are well known (notorious?) for being cooler than the rest of the house - north side of the house and two outside walls, plus draught under the suspended floor. Oh, and a bay window to increase the heat loss.

We are going to tackle the draught and under floor cold by putting Kingspan/Celotex in between the joists.

We have cavity wall insulation.

So apart from doing something drastic to the bay to reduce heat loss there isn't much more on the insulation front that looks doable.

The room isn't icy - just runs a couple of degree C below the rest of the house but it is noticeable when you go and sit in there to watch TV - and it seems wrong somehow to have to put on a jumper to go into Cinema 1.

Possibly low level electric heating at skirting board level but I'm still struggling with the cost of additional heating unless it is also attractive.

As the chimney area is going to be turned into AV storage (kit racked up inside the fireplace, wires up the chimney then through to the back of the TV) the focus of the room from the seating arrangement isn't suitable for a heating device any more.

Probably putting too much thought into something which is only an inconvenience for a couple of months in a year.

I'm also irritated with myself because we have just had all new central heating and could have included a separate zone for the lounge if I'd thought it through more.

Cheers

Dave R

Actually if you have underfloor space to run extar pipework and wires and you already have rads in there, adding the zone my not be that hard.

a local thermostat and local motorised valve fed from the CH timer, ort s erpate one, and prviding an alternative 'call for heat' too te CH system will wortk

You just have to pipe it in upstream of the MV that controls the rest of the house. Thats one hot pipe to run - the return can stay as is. In fact you can stuck te MV in te same place as the other one, and have the pipe downstream of that. Makes the wiring easier.

If ou use an RF stat, uyou dont even need to expoend the wiring, so teh joib becomes

- add one more MV take off from the boilerfeed, and a pipe from that to the room radiators, blanking off the old pipe.

- install RF stat reciever in Ch 'cupboard' to drive new MV

- wire the MV switche outoputs in parellel toexisting CH MV conatcts.

- install RF stat TX in room.

The only time consuming bit is the new MV and the only hard bit is running the new pipe under the floor and lagging it.

Cost are pretty low - a coupole of hundred parts wise at the most.

Swap the TV for a nice big plasma, turn it on half an hour before you go into the room to watch TV, and it'll be nice and warm in there :)

If you have a server or other computer that is on a lot of the time, can you re-locate it to live in the cold room? thus utilising the heat it kicks out to warm the room,

Not sure about the economics, but I use a 2KW electric fan heater with a thermostat for the times I don't want to fire up the wood burner in my (home) office - also north facing... Might be a cheap stop-gap if you're planning in UFH, etc. anyway.

Gordon

Nice plan except for:

(1) We already have a 42" plasma screen in there, and going larger for the extra heat output may not play well in certain quarters.

(2) My pleasures are few and simple (like my children) but one is irritating errr...assisting people on the Internet so I have a floor standing computer here in the main living room. I can sit here whilst my Lady Wife watches the TV in the lounge. I think that I would find Corrie and the X Factor a bit of a distraction if I moved into the lounge. I also play the occasional bit of music through the computer - again, this could cause contention if it was co-located with the TV. The Media Server is due to go in there in the fullness of time so that will add a bit to the heat ( a few hundred watts, perhaps). Have to finish wiring in the Ethernet first, though.

Still, as I said, a nice plan :-)

Cheers

Dave R

On 30/09/13 13:42, David.WE.Roberts wrote: The Media Server is due

??? mines barely 10 watts..

Extend the cables from the unit to your work station. Shoving the nasty noisy heat generating box out into the lounge...

Good grief what's it going to be! Some octo cored 50 GHz thing? Just ordered a Raspberry Pi to use as a media player, that'll be about 2.5 W, the NAS that it will play from is about 10 W. My PC, an ancient single core 1 GHz Athlon, takes about 100 W. I really ought to look at replacing it with a less power hungry and many times more powerful modern box.

You could, depending on the layout, use extension cables for the keyboard, mouse and monitor. ;-)

She'd probably co,mplain about the noise fomr the fans, though.

Well, it is an i5 2400K Sandy Bridge quad core processor with provision to add one or two video cards in the future so it has a large PSU and a large case.

I haven't over clocked it (yet).

It is more than just a video player - intended to edit HD video, run satellite and terrestrial TV cards, record, act as a general file server etc.

Cheers

Dave R

(e.g. 150

Don't infra red things just heat objects rather than the room. Good for stopping you freezing in an unheated drafty garage but so so good for comfort in a nominally heated space. Move out of the beam and you are back into a cold enviroment...

Fan heaters are good for quickly bringing a room up to temp but are noisey and blow things about. An oil filled electric radiator is slower to heat the room but is silent.