Electric underfloor heating?

[AGreatUsername]

How does it work, does it heat the room as well as the floor? Is it worth it? Expensive?

We are trying to do out our bedroom, and will have a small dressing room with floor space (after wardrobes etc) of roughly 2m square. Leading directly off that is the en-suite with floor area of around 2x1m. For various reasons getting radiators where we would need them is not viable, so I’m thinking electric heat mats are the answer? It’s the attic floor so suffers the extremes of temperature. Can I use lino in the bathroom over it or not? Thanks!

OMG...don't even consider it...costs a fortune. Know people that installed it and used j til they got their bill and never used again... horrendous.

Yes agree with that. Bills for our new house which is double the size of our old are lower than our old house- all due to ufh!

@whensmynexthol1day . I assume you have wet UFH. That is very efficiency and we have it. Electric is a disaster.

Our doesn’t cost a lot, we have it in two bathrooms. We have it set for 3 or 4 hours in the morning and 3 or 4 hours at night. I wouldn’t use it as a main source of heating - it’s more a nice to have. I don’t find that ours heats the room much but they are both big bathrooms in an oldish house.

No I was agreeing with you. We had electric in the old house. No ufh in the new house. My point was that our bills in our 3 bed semi with ufh were higher than our 5 bed detached because of the ufh

My neighbours have it in their bathroom except it has developed some sort of fault that apparently necessitates ripping up the (expensive) tiled floor to fix. They're not bothering.

Can you fit in a heated towel rail instead?

Ah, it doesn’t sound like the saviour I was after 😭 I can fit a normal towel rail in the bathroom, but the dressing room bit has no wall space free to take a radiator!

For such a small space, I would say it should do the job properly. As it's in an attic, would be sensible to make sure everything is insulated fantastically first though. You can always fit wet underfloor heating in there as well, would be a slightly more expensive outlay, but much cheaper to run

We have it in the bathroom and ensuite. No other heating, but smallish rooms and well insulated. Dont know whether you can use under lino, ours is under tiles. You can feel it within about 20 minutes of it coming on and heats up the rooms very quickly.

Fine in a bathroom but we have it in the main living space of our holiday cottage about 50 square metres and it costs a fortune to run. 2-300 quid a month easily and thats with it being supplemented by a large woodstove.

We’ve got it in our new extension kitchen/ diner. It is expensive to run but was easy to fit
Comes on quickly and is very effective
Think it would be fine for a small space

We had it installed under tiles when we had bathroom done and never ever use it now after we realised it was SO expensive to run. Obv floor was warmer but I don't miss it. Heated towel rail fab though.

Any under floor heating is totally dependent on high levels of insulation. Ie our floor is concrete with I think 6-8 Inches of solid insulation and then screed over it. I'm not sure how it works with floorboards as you need some insulation to stop it going down as opposed to up.

I would get some specialist advice but for such a small space I doubt it would be worth setting up a wet UFH system as the initial outlay would be expensive. As I said earlier, I wouldn't look at electric unless there was no other option. You could look at a slimline high output radiator and have a towel rail over which is what we have in one of our bathrooms

the heat output of electric UFH is quite low. I considered putting it in a utility room and WC but the floor area was too small to heat the rooms. It's about 120Watts per square metre and you are not supposed to put it under fitted furniture or anything. So once you deduct under the WC and units, there's not enough left to heat the room.

Many people with electric UFH in their main rooms turn it off the day they get the first winter fuel bill and never turn it on again.

We have it in a small bathroom as top up. Use occasionally on a timer and themosfar it's fine.

Wouldn't use it full time or for a large area though!
Main heating in our bathrooms are towel rails which are linked to the hot water system which are great as so cheap to run and on in the summer as well as winter so no soggy towels! And they have radiator valves so easy to turn down or off if there is a heat wave!