alternative heating

In previous articles we’ve looked at boilers, radiators and underfloor heating. These make up some 90% of all the ‘central heating’ that exists in UK homes. However, there are other heating units.

Night storage heaters are popular with some councils for their tenants as a fairly inexpensive way of heating homes. However, as has been previously pointed out, they are hardly convenient, pretty, or controllable. ‘Warm Air’ units (both gas and electric) are also popular with some budget builders. Some of these have a fan that blows the heat around the home through ducted grills.

The advantages of these are rapid warm-up times (almost instant heat) and a lack of radiators taking up wall space. However, they have to be planned from the start of building - certainly not something for renovation projects - and some users complain that they blow dust around. They are making a slight comeback though. Better air filters and the ability to combine air ionisers with filters might even see a return to this heating method by some architects and developers.

Developers of high price apartments and multi-bedroomed homes are looking to other forms of central heating to satisfy their demanding clients. Trench heating is popular with some. In this, a trench can either ring the perimeter of a room or simply lay in one section - usually beneath a large window. Into this trench lays either a pipe with heat-dissipating fins (heated by a boiler) or an electrically-heated tube. It creates a curtain of warmth that doesn’t allow condensation to get a look in. Obviously It must be aligned with the run of joists in a suspended floor. The one slight disadvantage is the installation cost. Our fictional 6.25m2 room would cost £700 for the electric version - including labour charges. The ‘wet’ version is even higher in installation costs as it requires a boiler, pump and valves. Trench heating is very aesthetically pleasing in a contemporary home. You’ll often see swanky magazines showing off London apartments with trench heating.

Another version of perimeter heating is ‘skirting’ radiators. There is one principle company here in the UK for this form of heating, and unfortunately their monopoly means a high premium for the product. It is a very aesthetically-pleasing product and naturally replaces the normal skirting board with an aluminium version. There are two versions available: wet and electric. In both, conduction of heat heats the entire surface. With the wet version two small tubes attached to the inside of the aluminium panels allow the heated water to flow and return. In the electric version a resistance cable is placed inside one of the tubes. The output is 150 watts per metre.

However, the purchase cost of this skirting heating is very high and really only for Premiership footballers and rock stars. Our fictional 6.25m2 room would cost £960 for the electric version. You could also wait for 5 weeks for delivery and the quality is actually really quite poor. Again, it’s really only a job for an installer with some experience, and final connection would have to be by a qualified electrician.

The manufacturers recommend a ‘white meter’ to low-heat the skirting during the night, thus using the fabric of the building as a thermal store. Like storage heaters though, this could prove pointless and wasteful.

At the other end of the expense spectrum is electric panel heaters. Mail order and online companies are now selling very smart 2 kilowatt panel heaters for as little as £35, and some of the lower-wattage ones are just 400mm in size - little more than the size of a magazine! In effect you could ‘centrally heat’ a 4-bed home for less than £500! Pay half as much again and each panel can be thermostatically controlled and timed as well. This then would be a completely independently-controlled heating system for a medium-sized home for the price of a dining room set! Even though electric panels would be more expensive to run, the installation costs are so low that it would take some years before the costs between this form of heating and a conventional radiator system equalised.

In our previous issues we’ve looked at how heating is only actually running for part of the year. Even then, thermostats will regulate the heat. Our panel system would then cost about £1450 in electricity for a 4-bed home. The overall first year costs including installation and electricity bills would therefore be £1900. The first year costs of a conventional ‘gas and radiator’ system including installation, gas bills and servicing would be way over £5000.