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FEATURES
“Hydronic floor heating doesn’t lend itself to small
areas,” Schröder agrees. “It’s not worth the costs.” He
says that generally, for anything bigger than 100m 2 ,
hydronic starts making sense and the running costs start
balancing out the initial investment. But once you drop
below 100m 2 , the costs escalate exponentially.
It is important to note that for retrofit applications,
electrical underfloor is probably your best bet as hydronic
requires about an extra 40–50mm floor height, which
will affect the entire building levels, including things like
doors and stairs.
the price of electricity was still negligible. But these days,
about 70% of their business is hydronic systems.
Although Pioneer still moves about 450kW of electrical
product every month in Johannesburg and surrounds, he
explains that this is more for domestic and smaller, spot
heating applications.
“The hydronic system is by far the best system available,
both for comfort and for running costs,” Stöhr says. “The
savings enjoyed from the running costs over an extended
period, normally at least 50 years (when using the best
systems), far exceeds the savings on installation costs.”
Although currently about 90% of the products that
Warmup sells into the local market are still for electrical
underfloor heating systems, the hydronic side is growing
fast, in particularly the commercial and industrial
markets, explains Tewson. Installation cost may be further reduced for hydronic
heating when installing an integrated biomass boiler
system for all domestic hot water needs, as well as pool,
Jacuzzi, radiator, towel rail, or fan coil heating.
Pioneer Floor Heating manufactures and installs both
hydronic and electrical underfloor heating systems across
the country. Schröder explains that they started off with
electrical, as hydronic wasn’t really available locally and APPLICATIONS
Other than the usual domestic application, the
possibilities for underfloor radiant heating are vast,
explains Schröder.
January 2019 Volume 25 I Number 1
www.plumbingafrica.co.za