Solar PV and Underfloor Heating for a Green Home

Environmentally friendly homes come in all shapes and sizes – but underfloor heating seems to be common to all of them

Environmentally friendly homes come in all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of solutions built in to combat ecological problems. But underfloor heating seems to be a common factor in most of them.

Solar photovoltaic or PV installers can also help you go green by reducing your carbon footprint.

The energy efficiency of a good underfloor heating system makes it a firm favourite with eco-warriors – and a brief survey of the green homes making the news shows the builders prefer underfloor heating to traditional systems.

Green houses use underfloor heating
An award-winning eco-friendly house in Lewes, East Sussex, made the BBC news in October 2007 when it was sold by its owners. It counted underfloor heating among its environmental benefits.

An “Eco Depot” in York was also singled out for environmental praise. It used underfloor heating alongside straw-bale wall construction and “breathable” lime render to reduce heating costs by up to 76 per cent.

And another BBC story reported on a couple in Fife who wanted to create a “green” bungalow for their retirement. They too plumped for underfloor heating.

Underfloor heating uses less energy
The environmental benefits of underfloor heating are based on a simple fact, which is that underfloor heating systems do not need to generate as much heat as traditional radiators, and consequently do not need as much energy to run them.

Radiators are much smaller than floors and so need to generate relatively enormous amounts of heat to warm a room.

Floors have the double benefit of being large enough to be able to heat a whole room with surface temperatures of around 21 degrees celcius, while their position at the bottom of the room ensures no heat is wasted (because heat rises, radiators produce a lot of heat that just goes up to the ceiling; heating the parts of a room people sit and stand in with a traditional heating system involves a lot of wasted energy).

Underfloor heating can take power from renewable sources
The knock-on effect of the low energy requirements of underfloor heating is that an underfloor heating system can often be powered by solar panels – something that cannot be said about traditional heating systems.

So not only does an underfloor heating use less energy – 40 per cent less in the case of the York Eco Depot – but it can take its energy from a green, renewable source.