I'm looking to replace the radiator in my upstairs bathroom and I'm considering under floor heating.
Is it possible to remove the radiator and attach a long length of plastic piping in its place and coil this under the floor? Would this give the same affect as under floor heating?
Cheers
Think "cat on a hot tin roof" ...
Yes, providing it's not too closely coupled to the floor surface otherwise it would overheat it since the temperature of water through rads is higher than that used un UFH systems. However bathrooms often need a greater heat input than UFH can provide since they tend to have relatively large amount of outside wall area for their floor area, some of which isn't usable being covered by the bath etc, and bathrooms also want higher temperatures than other rooms to be comfortable in.
You'd need to do the heatloss calcs on it - see the DIY wiki for links. See the UFH article there as well.
I'd be inclined to bung some 15mm pipe under the floors to warm them for comfort and have a proper radiator and/or towel warmer for space heating.
I've did this a few months back in a bathroom I was plumbing for a friend. The thinking was that the radiator pipework runs under a bit of the floor and generates a very nice effect. They wanted to get rid of the radiator, so I basically snaked more heating pipework under the floor. I used a couple of runs of 10mm copper, and because of copper's poor emissivity, lightly sprayed the top with black paint. A TRV was fitted poking out of pipework boxing (also a bleeding point). A run of the heating system seemed to indicate it is likely to work, but it wasn't cold at the time, so I need to wait and see.
Oh dear, one of those days...
Surely a pipe in the ceiling void below the floor boards will heat that space and since wood is quite a good insulator, very little will get through the floorboards. I thought UFH worked best when cast into a solid floor?
I think you can easily show that's wrong by standing on a wooden floor which has heating pipes running under it.
That's quite different, and more complex due to the time lag and the improved thermal coupling between the water and the solid floor requiring running the pipework at lower temperatures than radiators.
Actually the quick answer is yes...
Oh, wuite a lot does get through,. DWood isnt that bad a condictor. You want to put insulating UNDER the pipes to stop it losing heat downwards..
It was back in August when I wrote that. Now that the heating has been on, I'm told it's working very well. Ceramic tiled floor doesn't feel hot, but it's not cold either, and the bathroom temperature feels comfortable.
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Thats pretty much what you always feel with UFH. No hot spots, occasionally warm spots, and generally comfortable.
Unless you have Nu-Heat's old stuff, in which case you repeatedly feel pissed off at fixing yet another leak until you replace the whole lot.
Oh dear... how old is "old stuff" ? .. Actually, looking at their site they still use the same stuff they were using when I did ours.
My mate used Nu-Heat a year or 2 before us (well, his builder did) and said they provided brass manifolds for the floor lops which the builder just cemented in with the rest of the loop. He's sold that property now. :¬)
So far, we've had fault free operation for the last 3 years. Thankfully.
Well I followed advice, and had no underfloor joins at all, and pressurised the lot to a bloody high pressure before screeding, and absolutely nothing bar a motorised valve going on me has gone wrong in the last 6 years.
Based on
Downstairs mine is still okay (so far), I now have radiators upstairs. (The alternatives were put new underfloor heating on top of the existing floor then a new floor on top of that, or remove every downstairs ceiling.)
You'll be okay then. Or at least if you aren't okay, it'll be a different problem.
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