Freezing cold house

[hayleylou]

Hi,
We've recently moved in to a new flat, it's a top floor Victorian conversion. It has a Worcester Junior 24i boiler which everyone keeps telling me is great, but the house is always cold!
We have insulated the loft and as a lot of the roof slopes we have put celotex sheets in.
Some of the radiators are hot to touch, others aren't though they are all bled.
We have a single glazed skylight in the hallway which I know isn't helping but we can't afford to replace this at the moment.
I'm fed up of being cold and feeling quite miserable about it!! Any help or suggestions would be hugely appreciated.
Thank you.

 

[lee666]

Hi,
We've recently moved in to a new flat, it's a top floor Victorian conversion. It has a Worcester Junior 24i boiler which everyone keeps telling me is great, but the house is always cold!
We have insulated the loft and as a lot of the roof slopes we have put celotex sheets in.
Some of the radiators are hot to touch, others aren't though they are all bled.
We have a single glazed skylight in the hallway which I know isn't helping but we can't afford to replace this at the moment.
I'm fed up of being cold and feeling quite miserable about it!! Any help or suggestions would be hugely appreciated.
Thank you.

are the colder radiators furthest away from your boiler? if so, try reducing the amount of water going into the rads closest to the boiler and turn the ones that are cold right up. the rads should all have taps that do this, they might have a little plus and minus on the top of them, not like the thermostat.

we had a problem of the furthest rad taking ages to warm up so did the above and it's now piping hot a lot quicker

 

[hayleylou]

No not really. Even in the lounge (which is next to the kitchen) the radiators are hot but the room cold! The bedroom is almost unbearable but again the radiators are hot.
I don't know where the heat is going but it's definitely not in to the room.
Thanks

 

[Steady]

perhaps your radiators are undersized?

 

[Corgigrouch]

Define cold.... What temperatures are your rooms? Sounds like your system might ned ballancing if you have some radiators not getting to full teperature...

 

[JohnD]

Some of the radiators are hot to touch, others aren't though they are all bled.

for this, turn off the hot radiators and see if the cold ones become hot. If so, you need to Balance Your Radiators (see http://www.diynot.com/wiki/plumbing:faq:faq2 (I am sure you have not got thermometers, so try to adjust the Flow pipe to be "too hot to hold" and the Return pipe to be "too hot to hold for long" which I find is near enough.)

the radiators are hot but the room cold! The bedroom is almost unbearable but again the radiators are hot.

For this, the heat output of the radiators is less than the heat loss of the room. You need to tell us how big the rads are, if they are hot all over, how big the rooms are, what size are the windows and the external walls, how much of the roof and slope are insulated to what degree, whether the adjacent flats and underneath are heated, and what draughts you can detect (use a joss-stick or a fag and watch the smoke). You need to keep the internal doors closed during the heating season. This year is unusually cold, so maybe your flat will not usually feel so bad.

Glass, especially skylights, loses a vast amount of heat. You can apply DIY plastic sheeting which is cheap and nearly as effective as £10,000 of double-glazing.

 

[htgeng]

The first thing I would do is make up a cover for the skylight with a big thick sheet of celotex. Screw it over the skylight and silicone any edges.

 

[Agile]

At least you have got hot water and hot rads!

The tenants I went to a couple of hours ago had no heating or hot water for the last 15 days!

Tony

 

[hayleylou]

To try and answer all the below responses (sorry I'm new to this so hoping this is the right way)...
The radiator in the bedroom is around 500mm high and 1800mm long. The room is approx 4 metres square. Window is around 1000 width, 1700 high, double glazed. Around half the ceiling in this room is sloped and we have put Celotex insulation in the slopes and regular rolled insulation in the loft. This is the coldest room in the flat.
The radiators in the living room are both around 750mm high and 1100mm long. Again the room is approx 4 metres square. Around a third of the ceiling in this room is sloped, there is no insulation in this slope as we cannot gain access.
The radiator in the hallway is around 800mm high and 2000mm long. Though the hallway is huge and the ceiling very high as the flat is split level, that combined with the single glazed sky light no doubt means I'm currently doomed!
Though we are keeping all the doors closed, the only warm room is the kitchen.
No we do not have a thermostat though as the heating system is fully turned up I'm assuming it wouldn't get any hotter either way. We were sat in the lounge last night, heating fully turned up several layers on (2 long sleeved tops and a sweater which we didn't change out of from travelling in the snow earlier in the day) and we were still cold.
The radiators are hot all over with the exception being the one in the hallway (which isn't the furthest away) which is warm but you can hold on to it without it becoming too hot to touch.
All the radiators are singles. We have also put the foil backed insulation behind the radiators in the lounge which doesn't seem to have made any difference.
I'm wondering about having the walls insulated but as we are a top flat I'm assuming this would just drop to the bottom...?
We'll definitely get some Celotex plastic sheeting on the weekend and fix this to the skylight!!

 

[kevplumb]

what size pipework

 

[hayleylou]

Around 15mm.

Thanks

 

[RigidRaider]

It's a Victorian house?

Are all the fireplaces blocked off?

What is the boiler doing? Is it running almost constantly all evening or just a few minutes at a time?

What is the average room temperature?

How do you regulate the temperature in the flat?

Is the flat below you occupied? Have you asked the tenant how their heating is performing?

Any fins on those single rads?

 

[tryitandsee]

The sloping ceilings will just be lath and plaster, or possible 9.5mm thick plasterboard, then roofing felt if your lucky then the roof tiles!

That's probably all you have got between you and the stars. If you have dormer windows, the walls of which will be the same, if tile hung from the outside. It will be down to how much insulation you can get into your flat. In an ideal world, you would have to overboard with new uprated insulation boards, with multi layered foil blanket.

The new regulations for loft conversions have gone some way to solving a long suffered problem.
The Victorians were not the best for keeping the warmth in. How we all romanticize there way of life, it must have been miserable in the depths of winter

 

[htgeng]

How we all romanticize there way of life, it must have been miserable in the depths of winter

I agree. We have boilers, insulation, double glazing. But they survived and we are living proof. Oh what a blast they must have had freezing in the trenches in World War 1.

This is exceptional weather and not the usual 5c winters we usually get. Its been 10 degrees colder than that at night since before xmas. All you can do is try to cocoon yourself into a room and put on warm clothes. This weather has reminded me about fitting a door between the kitchen and hallway as the stairs act as a chimney for all the warm air downstairs.

 

[Whitespirit66]

Yes, the Victorians survived.

Big difference now, is that life expectancy of a victorian male averaged at 52. Now its 81 years.