On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 16:46:50 +0100, "in2minds"
wrote:

Since you have a cellar, I assume that the house is an older type....
If so, and it doesn't have cavities, or they are not insulated, then
doing some zoning rather than heating the whole house makes a lot of
sense.


1912 terraced miners cottage
2 storey at front, ground floor level with main road
3 storey at back, cellar door level with rear garden
there are no cavities (45cm stone walls) and the cellar is below ground
on 3 sides


heating is via a combi/radiators, looking at the pipe work I couldn't
zone upstairs and downstairs without ripping up the flooring to access
the pipes (not an option).

LJ


OK.

Given that the walls are stone, the normal impact is that the heatloss
is quite a bit, but with different behaviour to a brick built house
because the stone will store more heat. I suspect that the effect is
that when you have been away and the house has been left without
heating it takes a while to warm up, but once warm doesn't cool that
quickly either.

I think that I would be inclined to continue heating the house as you
have been - just when required. I guess that it's not realistic to
insulate the walls of the house either and it wasn't in the scope of
the question. You could try out the impact on energy consumption of
running the heating when required vs. during the day as well to see
what extra is used to do that. A simple way to do that, would be
to read the gas meter daily and note outside temperatures at the same
time each day for a week with heating on part of the day, and then
repeat the exercise the following week with heating on all day.
Assuming your use of hot water is reasonably constant day to day, you
could pick days out of each week where outside temperature is about
the same and compare. This isn't going to be super-accurate, but
will give a reasonable idea.

For the cellar, I assume you have more or less a clean sheet of paper.
I definitely think that insulating it is worth doing, because apart
from reducing heat loss dramatically, it will mean that the space will
warm up very quickly.

With a combi based system, if you can conveniently access the main
heating flow and return pipes, and you can run pipework to that point,
you could create one zone of the cellar and one zone of the rest of
the house using two motorised valves. Running cost for that will be
less than heaing the cellar with electricity, but you have to weigh up
whether the installation work is worth it.

At least if you've insulated the cellar, you will have achieved the
best situation if you do decide to go with electricity. In that
situation, I think I'd go for oil filled radiators on the wall or fan
heater fitted out of harm's way. Underfloor heating will take longer
to warm the room,





--

..andy

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