Best way to heat a large room with vaulted ceilings?

[tracyk]

Are refurbing bungalow. Large open plan lounge/dining/kitchen with vaulted ceiling. Not much wall space for radiators so were going to do electric underfloor heating. Plumber says to use convection heaters off gas boiler.

Anyone any experience/running costs to compare?

I don't have any experience, but my next door neighbour who is an architect is doing a big open plan barn conversion and he is putting in underfloor heating, but the plumbed in type, not electric.

I think over a large area that would be more economical to install and run.

I know that the wet system would be more economical - but I'd have to lift all the floors and dig down etc etc - so a big upheaval. Whereas I can just lay a thin mat of cables on exsitng floor for electric.

Just don't know how much more £££ it will be than wet though.

I have both hot water and electric under floor heating in different bits of the house. hot water under stone, electric under tile and coir.

hot water heats up much faster, electric takes a while to get going, eg I have it in a guest room and turn on the heating the day before people are using it for it to permeate. It is good if you are using it at a low level all the time, but I wouldn't recommend it eg for a weekend house because it just isn't that sensitive.

THe other trouble about it in a high room is that you have a large volume of air to heat, and only a limited amount of floor space to run the electric heating on. ie if you had radiators, for a big room you'd have more of them and each one would be bigger/fatter to let off more heat. With underfloor heating you can only run the electrics so close together - then you can't do any more. So if it was a REALLY big room with a big volume of air to heat, I'd also be a little nervous about it.
I don't really know about running costs, I can't work out what bits of my electric bill are for the heating (used intermittently) and for lights etc I must say. Well, I haven't really looked.

If I were you I'd go onto one of those homebuild websites (is there one associated with grand designs?) and ask a question on their boards - you should get some informed answers from people who have looked into all this.

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks PrincessPeaHead
My plumber did say it would cost a fortune to heat the space. I shall have a look on some of the housebuilding sites.
Thanks

I have seen some little radiator type heaters that go in the kick space under your kitchen cupboards - they connect to your central heating. We got a very tall radiator 6 feet tall and about one foot wide to heat our kitchen extension - made use of an awkward space and kicks out loads of heat and I think because it's so tall it does heat the top of the room.