Talk:Central heating design

This is a skeleton giving a structure to an article to be written as Tuits permit.

--John Stumbles 18:54, 4 January 2007 (GMT)

Under pipe layout you missed one: radiator on the hot water circuit :). Not as rare as it should be. NT 22:30, 13 January 2007 (GMT)

UFH Efficiency

How is ufh more efficient? Elevated slab temp would surely mean more heat loss than rads? NT 07:36, 15 January 2007 (GMT)

If the floor is not well insulated from the walls you get heat loss through the walls and, for ground floors, into the soil outside. I don't have a link for it but recall reading of a post-WWII housing development in the USA which had UFH in the floor slabs which weren't insulated from the walls. Gardeners living in these houses thought they had green fingers (or green thumbs as they say over there) because the warming of the surrounding soil allowed everything to grow early! Of course fuel was cheap then and there so I guess they weren't too bothered about their fuel bills. (The UFH was also in copper pipe so these installations all corroded through after a few decades and most of the remaining housing stock now has conventional heating systems.)

However assuming one has floor slabs properly insulated from the walls and otherwise correctly installed UFH I understand the amount of heat needed to make a room comfortably warm is substantially less than with radiator-based systems where much of the heat goes into warming the air which accumulates at the ceiling and gets lost through ventilation. It would be good to give some references when I (or anyone else) fills out that part of the article but I was still just roughing it out.

--John Stumbles 11:52, 15 January 2007 (GMT)

It'll be interesting to read about that once its done. NT 19:20, 15 January 2007 (GMT)