Underfloor heating is *laggy* in that it has to re-heat the thermal mass of your floor material before adding anything to the air temperature. With the current energy cost concerns, most of our room stats are 18C or lower. The warmest places are the airing and cloaks cupboards where the heating manifolds live!
So is mine largely.
You have a health problem. I am comfortable with just a T-shirt and jeans on at 21°C.
Good grief. Rarely above 18C here. 15C in the day is fine.
Temperature tolerance is a strange thing given we're (mostly) the same species in the same UK climate.
Apparently as we get older we're less able to feel cold, yet more susceptible to its ill effects.
We lose sensation, but we are so much lower at a metabolic rate that we actually get colder.
My late mother ended up in hospital (fell and broke her hip), where she complained of 'being cold'. I asked why?, and the doctor said' because she *is* cold, and we are not sure why'.
At home she had been running the CH very hot.
I think she was put on thyroid pills for an underactive thyroid. Not uncommon in older people.
It might be a way to save on heating bills - Take Thyroxin!
I agree. Our living room is set at 20°C. When I an WFH, I am sat in it, in jeans and tee-shirt, no shoes and no socks, with laminate flooring. As my WFH days keep changing, the timer is not set for those days and so I tend to turn the heating back on (each room is independent) when it drops to below 18°C (assuming that I have noticed that it is cold by then).
Possibly so.
In which case I envy you.
Nope, just different preferences.
I'm not and never have been.
Bert, don't trust me, go and get your thyroid tested. If one pill a day makes you feel warm again, its cheaper than burning oil or gas.
Seriously, 24°C, if genuine, is right at the limits of 'normal'.
Why should you be happy with that?
If you genuinely have a health problem, all that will do is make you in denial of it, which is dangerous.
Particularly since an underactive thyroid is very easily fixed.
An update: with the upstairs wall thermostat turned down to 16C and the UFH thus effectively switched off, the cracking noises seemed to have stopped altogether, but then there was an isolated couple of them (not as loud as the worst of before) quite late in the evening. I couldn't see or discover any specific triggering cause.
The temperature in the two rooms in the loft conversion dropped as expected, stabilising around 21C thanks to the heat from downstairs. This was just about tolerable for the bedroom but definitely not so for the bathroom, which unfortunately wasn't given a separate zone of its own.
This evening I returned the stat to 23C and it wasn't too long before the noises returned, almost exactly as before. I don't know if I'm conveying just how loud and startling they can be: I'd record them and post an audio file but without a reference level I'm not convinced it would mean anything.
So, the experiment established that it's the heating which is causing the problem; now I have to decide what to do about it.
turn down to 18C
Do you have UFH in a wooden structure floor/ceiling? Is it made of copper or plastic pipes?
You could try lowering the heating water temperature. 50C is good for rapid response and probably boiler efficiency/fuel consumption but not necessary for 24 hour occupation in a well insulated house.
>
Our house plainly did some slight shifting during a long hot dry summer then a cold winter a few years ago. It was shortly after some building work too so I was particularly concerned. It seems to have settled since.
Yes, the floor/ceiling is wood and the pipes are flexible plastic. I don't know the exact details of the structure, though from a small exposed section by the manifold it appears that the pipes are in a screed of some sort, which presumably must in turn be supported by a solid surface, probably chipboard. So perhaps the total "sandwich" is (bottom to top) chipboard - screed containing pipes - chipboard - carpet.
I have wondered if the noises could be generated by the heating system alone, not by structural movement at all.
not > necessary for 24 hour occupation in a well insulated house. Thanks for the thought. The current setting is 45C but I could try taking down even further.
Thanks for the thought.
the wife still listens to your stuff when cutting the lawn....quality
I suspect not if you have plastic -in - screed. What is far more likely is that there is wood movement due to excessively dry air under call for heat conditions. Normal softwood will move 3-5% summer to winder across the grain and about 1% along the grain, whereas chipboard is far more stable
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