Heating an open plan living area - UFH?

ariba10

It is the height that robs the heat.

We have what was in effect three rooms and part of a passage and it warms up reasonably quickly, but open the door to the stairs and upper landing and you can feel the cold air pouring in.

As GMGMGM suggested. Try to curtain off the area and see the difference.

loracan1

My sister's first house was open from the living room to the stairs - as I recall they divided it off with full height tinted sliding mirror doors.

madeupname1

loracan1 wrote: »

My sister's first house was open from the living room to the stairs - as I recall they divided it off with full height tinted sliding mirror doors.

thanks loracan1. do you happen to know what kind of company / tradesmen she used to do the work?

nickj_2

my house was open plan ,but tthe previous owners blocked off the stairs and put doors into the living room-

acaj13

Hi we have twice installed water based UFH in homes we have bought. In both cases we placed it over the existing floor be it concrete, tiles or boards (or all of them in the first case). In both cases it has worked beautifully.

In our home now we run the UFH via a heat pump as we dont have gas. Downstairs is nearly all open plan but the heating really works well. Its much warmer than it was and costs us less to run. There are no cold patches as there are with radiators and you run at a lower temperature than rads and it still is warm. We ran it off our gas boiler in our last house without any difficultly. As our UFH is on top of the original floor, not in concrete it does not take that long to heat - about half an hour if memory serves and then you could feel the flooring was warm. We used a really good company for the UFH and after supplying them with a scale floor plan (created in ms paint) they designed the layout of the pipes. This time I did the laying of the pipes as it is not complicated and it saves paying a plumber to do it. The plumber did all the important stuff like connecting the manifolds to the boiler etc but he was working to the design provided by the UFH company. It is worth noting that some UFH companies supply you with everything you need except copper piping to connect to the boiler and others do not - their quotes seem cheaper but you have to buy all these extras which makes them more expensive.

Hope you solve your prob - personally I'd go down the UFH route if you can but it will cost you more than a curtain would.