In our house we have underfloor heating powered by a geothermal heat pump we had retrofitted a decade ago. However one room, over the garage, never had any heating and we are exploring options on how we can do this.
It seams, in Vaud at least, anything involving electricity is strictly impossible these days. No underfloor pads, no baseboard heaters, nothing. Even the electric portable heater I bought at the Migros a few years back is apparently now illegal.
At a minimum we will be insulating the floor and putting down new parquet but that isn’t going to make the room warm in the winter time.
The garage has got space for solar, but in Winter that’s not going to work too well.
I’m looking for non-electric solutions. Any positive experiences.?
Well we had an expert around today and he says in Vaud just about everything electric is no longer permitted to be “installed” i.e. He won’t do because he can’t.
It’s an office, got two iMacs, a scanner and a printer and a bunch of bookcases and two desks. Room is used a few times a week but not every day.
To be honest, I’d get a couple of portable electric fan-type heaters of some sort (which don’t need installing).
They’ll heat the room in a few minutes and can be turned off after use so although the running cost per hour may be quite high, the fact that they are off most of the time would negate this.
If you insulate the room well, the computers might do a pretty good job of heating it. My own office gets heated up quite a lot when the computer is on the whole day.
I would also go down the insulation route, especially since the room sits on top of a garage which is a heat sink, so consider insulating the garage ceiling or the floor of the office.
With regards your current geothermal set up, is there no option to extend that with pumps and piping to the office space? or is it a question of cost and intrusiveness?
A final solution might be a compact air-to-water unit in the garage which heats the room. This should still keep you within the rules because heat comes from a heat-pump process rather than direct electric resistance (e.g. radiators).
We converted a cellar room into a games/TV room for teenagers. Insulated the floor. Installed a wall mounted electric infra red heater ( there are also stand up ones - modern versions of the old bar heaters) that worked wonderfully. I see the catalytic heater also works by infra red radiation - they are much better for instant heat than radiators which do not “radiate” much heat.
Back in my student days, lived in a house with no heat. We all went down to the local homeowner shop and picked up the cheapest of sheet metal wood stoves and installed em in our bedrooms. Did the job for little money. Had to watch em though. If they got to hot they would start to glow red.
For us the issue in the cellar was less a technical one as the other cellar room housed the geothermal heat pump. It was more a bureaucratic issue about the available living space. The cellar did not count towards “living” area which the architect had maxed out with the other floors.
