Underfloor heating is the 21st century way to heat your home, even though it has been in use for 7,000 years. Back in the day, they used to cut channels in the floor and cover them with stones. These were heated using strategically placed fires.
In the meantime, we built fireplaces, and some homes still use those today, but mostly as an additional form of comfort. Many homes use a radiator system, but now we are going back to underfloor heating because it has so many advantages compared with radiators.
With underfloor heating you use less energy, so not only is it more eco-friendly but you also save money on your heating bills. Both of those are good points, but also good is the fact that underfloor heating heats the whole room evenly. When you use a radiator system, the area next to the radiator is warmest. The radiator works using convection, so the hot air rises above the radiator to the ceiling (where you don’t really need it) and then gets distributed around the room. This means that there will also be cold spots in the room.
In addition, as the air moves around the room, it carries with it dust, and if you have a carpet, probably dust mites as well. this is not good for people who have allergies, or something such as asthma.
Underfloor heating produces radiant heat, and it heats the whole room evenly, leaving no cold spots and also not distributing dust around the room. So, there are many advantages to underfloor heating.
Two Types Of Underfloor Heating
There are two types of underfloor heating, electric and water based. Electric heating uses either a heating wire or a heating mat which has heating wires built into it. Unfortunately, electricity is expensive and is only going to get more so, thanks to the increase in gas prices and to Mr Putin. It is really only viable for small rooms such as the bathroom, because it would be too costly to heat large areas. So, water based underfloor heating is the way to go.
This uses a water pipe which circulates warm water heated by a heat source -often your boiler, but it could also be an air-source or ground-source heat pump or solar panels. When installing a water based system, the pipes need to be covered by a screed, and a liquid screed in Beaconsfield has several advantages over the traditional sand and cement screed.
To begin with, it can be laid far more thinly than sand and cement, so less energy will be used to heat the screed. A liquid gypsum screed is also nearly twice as thermally efficient as sand and cement, again requiring less energy to reach the same temperature.
Liquid screed is actually more expensive than sand and cement, although not vastly so. However, because less screed is required to cover the heating pipes, the actual installation costs work out at about the same. From that point on, the savings created by using a liquid screed will continue for the life of the property.
