Diy Conservatory Heating

Conservatory heating and heaters
Heating your conservatory can be achieved with little disruption to your home, extending the central heating system into the conservatory is the best way to provide heating there. Running a wet heating system into a semi-exposed room like a conservatory can attract some basic energy-efficiency measures, but nothing that doesn’t make for good practice and cheaper fuel bills. If you think of your conservatory as a separate zone, you need to design in some ability to shut off the heating when you’re not in there and control the amount of heat pumped in when you are.

These are two separate issues, both of which will allow you to control the heating in this the conservatory.

First, plumbing in a flow bypass or loop will allow the conservatory part, the extended part, of the system to be closed off from the flow of hot water. Not only will the radiators be isolated from the supply of hot water, but the pipes serving them as well. A drain-off point on the system will allow this zone to be drained down when the conservatory is unseasonally out of use: drain-off points are best located on the radiator tail pipe that is nearest to the external doors. To drain down this part of the system, a hose will have to be attached and the water run off to the outside. When this happens, having a nearby door is going to help and you should always make sure the water runs to a dead space or suitable drain – heating system water, treated with rust-inhibitor, will efficiently kill off grass and any other plants that it is discharged over, and by then your plumber will be gone, shrugging his shoulders somewhere else.

Second, controlling the temperature means introducing some thermostatic control. You can do this by way of thermostatic radiator valves or a programmable roomstat. Radiator valves known as TRVs have become standard equipment, but we tend to forget to alter them – left on a preset number and forgotten about, the control is gone, and before you know it, you’ll be pumping heat from a piping hot radiator all week and never setting foot in there.

Much better is the programmable type of roomstat, which lets you set the room’s minimum temperature as a separate zone and heats up the radiator only when it drops below that. Some models enable a different programme to be set for weekends than weekdays and most allow three or more on-off settings per day. Your programme might keep a minimum night-time temperature of 10C and a weekend daytime minimum of 16C. If the sun comes out, the room temperature will soon respond very quickly and so the heating system is really no more than a back-up in the event of solar failure, enough to keep the atmosphere and furnishings dry and the plants alive in winter.

Conservatory Underfloor heating
With a low wall and a proliferation of windows in a conservatory, finding radiator space isn’t always easy and many people choose underfloor heating to rid themselves of the clutter of pipes and radiators and allow total freedom with furnishings and decorating.

Instead of extending your central heating system with radiators to your conservatory, this allows you to use the whole floor as the radiator. Instead of a steel water-filled panel on the wall, an underfloor heating circuit consists of a loop of plastic pipes beneath the floor. The loop should have its own thermostatic control, so you can control the temperature of this separately to the rest of the system.

Under a solid ground floor, the pipes should be laid over insulation and pinned into it before being screeded over. Burying all that plastic pipework in cement and sand is a bit worrying but the pipes are joint-free and pressure-tested before this happens, so there should only be a problem if you puncture the screed with fixings later on.

With timber floors, the pipes are supported in clips that also set the spacing of the loops and are fixed to the underside of the floorboards. 22mm thick flooring is required here to reduce the risk of pipes being nailed through by carpet fitters.

If the water in your area is quite hard and limey, you should fit a limescale reducer to the supply: the in-line cartridge filled ones that require a new cartridge every 12 months are small enough to be plumbed in beneath a kitchen cupboard.

If you imagine the small surface area of even a double panel radiator heating a room, it needs to operate at a high temperature if it is to do its job. Underfloor heating is different because the entire floor is your radiator, the temperature at which it operates is much lower, typically only 2 or 3 degrees C above the room temperature required. In a sun lounge or a conservatory, maintaining heat to a relatively low background temperature at night should be much easier with this type of system. No longer will you be walking past a hot convecting current of air on one wall of the room; instead the entire room is warmed gently and slowly to an even temperature. Conservatory floor finishes of tiles or stone are perfect for this form of heating: natural timber laminates and blocks are not ideal, given their thickness, but other forms of laminates can be used.