Underfloor Heating Wet or Dry with Solar panel

9 years ago

I am extending a 1930's semi and want to go for UFH on the ground floor. Its a complete renovation so new floor will be required in the existing house as well. I have to decide between
1. Wet UFH - basically to keep running cost lower
2. Dry UFH - Installation cost lower

To counter the higher running cost of Dry UFH I plan to install Solar panels. The idea is to get the house warm during the day so minimal heating is required later during the evening and night. With Solar panel I will be able to run other appliances as well keeping the electric and gas bill down.

I have worked out that cost of installation of Wet UFH will be same as Dry UFH plus Solar panel.

Will dry UFH with solar panel work? Please advice.

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Comments (4)

PRO
OnePlan
9 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Given those choices, the electric powered by the sun sounds a good option ! I have electric UFH in my kitchen - it's the only warm room in the house when the heating is off ! (Which is most of the time as its so darn expensive to heat this old house !)
I have mine on a timer - on for 15 mins off for 10 ... Then off all night till 06:30 !
Have fun with your home makeover !!
maanavs thanked OnePlan
PRO
On The Tiles (hillingdon) ltd
8 years ago
Wet under floor heating will be far cheaper to run and in my experience is always a better option except in small bathrooms which dont have a large enough floor for standard wet sytems to work well. When you say solar panel do you mean Solar thermal...they will heat water which of course would only be of use for the wet under floor heating. If you are thinking of photo voltaic panels then of course they only generate electricity for immediate use and only when it is sunny which is when you are least likely to be using your underfloor heating. It only costs about £50 to have a professional energy survey carried out on ypur house and the report will tell you the most sensible way to spend money to reduce your energy footprint. Unfortunately it generally advises unexciting insulation as the most cost efficient way forward long before solar heat pumps and wind turbines ;-)
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Trying to be unbiased....lol.... Check your ceiling heights, underfloor often is a great option if you have lower ceilings and good insulation but in Victorian properties with 3m high ceilings for example, underfloor is unlikely to meet the heat output require. Also bear in mind reaction times, underfloor takes hours rather than minutes to heat up so you should have it on all the time in theory even if just on low. My parents have a Victorian house and have electric underfloor in their basement kitchen/diner, but have a small vertical radiator with hooks on for tea towels and a traditional style column radiator as well. They have the radiators on most of the time as per their central heating programming but they "turn the floor on" when they are planning on doing loads of laundry or its really cold (like today!); it does really speed up drying times. It definitely feels nice having it under the tiles They don't have it on all the time as it is expensive to run. So if you are doing the whole house and decide to go with underfloor, I would definitely try and go for the central heating underfloor as the running costs would be very expensive if electric.
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Hi Gabby, Well after a bit of research and speaking to my electrician re the infra red panels, it was decided to give them a miss. However, that then meant that we had not planned for UF heating so we ended up having to have high output rads on what few walls we had left! Bit of a pain really. We have pipes going to the island if we ever want plinth heaters (although they are a bit noisy as operate using fans - even for the plumbed in ones!) to give us more heat in the middle of the room. To be honest, the rooms are quite warm during the winter days when the sun is out so we only have to worry about evenings and cold winter where our log burner will be on anyway. If we could go back, we would have had wet UF heating put in the new extension. Wouldn’t bother with electric as too expensive and cheaper just to have rads put in
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Not fully aware of all your points.. I think there are super slim systems available that you can get that mean you don't need to excavate down as much in the existing floor but not sure how the price would compare. but otherwise generally yes, I think you would need to dig down.. and then it depends on the type of subfloor that is currently there, how far down and what kind of prep you'd need... (it's why we ended up not doing it) and flooring wise we've just discovered... if you're going for Karndean/amtico/LVT they have to have 1day/mm depth of screed that you've just poured before they can pour the latex layer before the LVT! we only found this out really late... and discovered we had a 75mm deep screed... so need to wait 75 days in total.. which overall has delayed it by 2-3 weeks. They can add an accelerant to the screed that reduces the time by I think half. (but apparently is quite expensive) Not sure about other floor types
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Frank
8 years ago
Independent of the UfH the use of Solar PV is definitely a good idea. You'll have to significantly oversize it though if you want to make an impact on winter time heating, because the winter sun even on a good day won't give you more than 5% panel efficiency averaged over sunshine duration.

Electric UfH is cheaper to install and usually argued to "switch on fast" and to be "100% efficient". The latter two are marketing though - the switch on time depends on the thermal mass (thickness of the screed; set electric into thick screed for heat retention and it won't react faster than wet UfH) and what gets warm fast also cools down fast. All direct electric-to-heat is 100% whether it goes into the water for wet UfH via immersion heater or into the electric UfH. Remember water is the perfect heat store; heat it up during the day and you can still use it the next morning (traditionally, heat it up on economy7 during the night ... how solar PV can change things).

Wet UfH has the advantage that you can choose the main heating system. If you're all-electric use a Heatpump to boost what you'd get from direct electric alone. Otherwise use the gas boiler you have with a warm water storage buffer tank (and run the immersion on PV).

Electric UfH has its place; a bathroom refurb or a garden room; for a major project, entire floor or all of the house, I'm not a fan. Wet is much more flexible there.
Carl Holding
8 years ago
is underfloor heating a must..?

If it is and you have solar pv installed I would go with a air to water system.

contact me...we do specialise in pv ,,air to air and also air to water systems and can give you some great information about how you can get payd to gen your energy

thanks carl

Underfloor Heating Wet or Dry with Solar panel

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OnePlan

On The Tiles (hillingdon) ltd

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