Struggling to heat my new home.

brig001

Is this house new and have you talked to your neighbours?
If it is a new estate, I would get together with your neighbours, find out if they have similar problems and get the builders to sort it out. As a guide, our 1996 detached house is about 100 sq m, it is 1 deg C outside, our radiators are just warm and it is 21 degrees in here.

As to what is wrong, here are some guesses based on things we found in our 1996 build:
If the walls are plasterboard, the blockwork behind it may not be properly pointed. Unscrewing a socket front will let you check this (with the power off), you may even feel a draught there.
Anything that goes through the inner wall (assuming brick/block cavity wall) should be sealed. Our first floor joists weren't, making the downstairs ceiling/upstairs floor cold. We could feel a slight draught under the upstairs skirting boards, and the edges of the carpets got dirty.
We have a integral garage with insufficient insulation between that and the bedroom above.
The blockwork between the garage and the house was not properly pointed making it draughty under the stairs.
We had two extractor fans upstairs - bathroom and en suite - and neither had decent shutters to keep out the wind when not in use.
We were 10 square metres of loft insulation short as the builders couldn't be bothered to do the corners.
The loft hatch was not airtight.

The list goes on, but hopefully something might ring true with yours.

Good luck,
Brian.
PS. PM me if you would like a full list and photos etc.

sunshinetours

Our house feels very chilly if doors to hallway are left open. As you say you you have closed the lounge door and room warmed up much better I think you are answering your own question. Turn up the thermostat a bit and close doors. Consider leaving heating on for a day up higher to get some heat into the fabric of the building and see how that feels?

Tiled floors will certainly not help the feeling of cold either I am afraid.

if you have been used to a semi or terraced or even a flat before, you will certaibnly notice a detached houseof a reasonable size like yours may take considerably more heating than you are use to as well!

However having heard about some horror stories on some new build houses by the big builders i would listen to post above thsi one

Good luck

27col

Radiator sizing is normally done on a room by room basis. For the calculations to work properly the rooms need to shut off from one another, ie the doors should be shut. If they are not, then there will be heat flow between different rooms, causing draughts.
The main reason for this is that rooms are calculated for different temperatures. For instance, it is normal for living rooms to be at a higher temperature than kitchens, hallways, stairs etc. The same applies upstairs. The bathroom will normally be heated to a higher temperature than the bedrooms or landing.
Obviously the situation in different houses will vary, depending on who actually did the radiator size calculations. Assuming that someone actually did, and that it was not just guesswork by the installer.
Something else has just occurred to me.
When the radiator size calculations are done part of them includes the ambient temperature outside the house.
I don't know about other people, but my calculations are based on an ambient temperature of 32F or 0C. If the ambient temperature is less than this, as it has been recently, then the inside calculated temperatures will not be reached by the system. This is definitely the case with my CH system. At the moment it is struggling to reach the design temperatures.

brig001

Just another thought, if you are getting draughts at keyholes, where is the air going? You need two holes to make a draught - one in and one out - where is the other hole? Joss sticks might help you find it, but it is not easy when the radiators are hot because of convection moving air around the house. You could close the door to a room and hold a lit joss stick near the gap under the door to see if air is entering or leaving a room and go from there. You might be able to narrow it down to one room where most of the air is going.

HTH,
Brian.