Have you bought a new home recently, or been living in your family home for a while? Do you need a new heating system installed before next winter?
Retrofitting a central heating system into an existing home is entirely possible. Depending on how your home is built, there are different challenges that we have to get around.
As a general rule, we can always retrofit a radiators system into an existing home. Trying to retrofit underfloor heating is much more complicated and expensive, although not impossible.
The first question we need to ask is whether your home has a suspended timber floor, or a concrete slab on the ground. Most modern homes are built with a slab floor, while older homes often have suspended timber.
With a timber floor, it’s usually quite simple to get under the house and run pipes between the boiler and the new radiator locations. We can bring the pipes up through the floor to join into the radiators.
If your home has a concrete floor slab, then we can’t get underneath the house. Instead, we would run the pipework through the ceiling cavity, and then come down inside the internal walls.
Getting the pipes into existing walls is a little trickier than coming up through the floorboards but it’s generally manageable. Any extra holes that have to be cut in the wall lining can be repaired later.
The boiler can be installed in your laundry, garage or on a plinth outdoors.
If you own an existing home and you’re looking at installing a heating system, talk to your installer about the best way to do it. There’s almost always a way to get the radiators installed and it’ll make a big difference to your home comfort next winter.