On 4 Mar, 17:30, "Autolycus" wrote:
"Jon" wrote in message

...

We've got a bedroom above the garage in our eight year old house which
is always 5 deg C colder (or more) than the rest of the house on cold
days. The fact that the bedroom floor is always cold leads me to
believe the insulation requires significant improvement between the
garage ceiling and bedroom floor.

This may be a deeply unfashionable thing to suggest, and may be highly
offensive to some regulars on this group, but I'll say it anyway:

Have you considered putting a bit more heat into the room?


Is the
radiator at the same temperature (in and out) as the others in the
house?

Yes

Does it have a thermostatic valve, and if so, is it set and
working correctly?

Yes, and it works fine. The rad gets as hot as the rest in the house.

Could you put a suitably controlled larger radiator
in, or substitute a double for a single?

It's already a double. Larger rad = more load on boiler which is only
just the right size for a 4 bed house (cheap ass persimmon).

Depending on how long you intend to live there, and how much of the day
you need the room to be warm, it may even be more cost-effective than
buying lots of insulation. A quick look at the calculations for the
system I've just put in suggests that the most heat loss you could hope
to save would be perhaps a couple of hundred watts.

You're not wrong. And I intend staying here for quite a while yet.

The floor will always be cold in the room as long as the lack of
insulation between the garage and the room above allows it. No matter
how much heat I throw in, the garage below will act as a heat sink.

Maybe I'd be better off insulating the garage. But the garage door has
so many gaping holes letting cold air in through the gap between the
frame that it'd not be cost effective either unless I changed the door
(expensive).



There, I've said it.

At least you say you've got a carpet in there, which will help: better
than a solid-copper-with fins-underneath floor, or whatever is
fashionable today.

I'm just looking for a sensible solution to the problem.

Thanks for your reply.