Heating for tiny office

[CharlieB]

We've bitten the bullet and are fitting out an old stone calf shed as an office. It'll be insulated reasonably well but not the floor. I'll install a stove if we end up using it lots, but I also want something electric I can just turn on. Are these underfloor electric mats any good or should I just go for a radiative electric heater? https://www.screwfix.com/c/heating-plum ... rand=klima It would only have carpet on top - we're not bothering with a proper raised floor.

Floor is not perfectly even even concrete. I'm thinking about these tiles for a bit of insulation and comfort, below the electric mat if I use one. Any thoughts? https://www.jamessmithfencing.co.uk/int ... green-20mm

Thanks all. Good to be back on here.

Charlie

[Mr Gus]

If the floor is not insulated then by placing floor heating (underfloor yes)? then you are just p1551ng heat away needlessly in a time of premium prices..

Can you live with that? go the extra mile, if you have headroom to spare, especially if it is a daily use office & will rack up the hours as a very regular workspace.

Those mats are very expensive for what they are, how many for the office & how stable is furniture, I did use some (thinner ones but same material rescued when clearing up a local festival fo under our dogs night cage in the workshop, but the difference was I still had foam sheet slab insulation underneath, side walls on top (with a heater inside the pen, ..but the rest of the rooms was as cold as hell because it was a room within a room essentially (the pen was a sleeping cage area with an oil rad (smallest one available boxed in with heat into the cage other side of the mesh, beyond that were pig bar fencing to give them area to move / get boisterous.

As an office itself it used to get bloody cold sitting in there without a human heater, so I resorted to ski-gear & a blanket.
Not acceptable to anyone bar me.

If your feet are cold the rest of you is cold, ..& if you have female staff, regardless of how hardy they are susceptibility to cold often ends up adding more heat rather than solving the problem.. daft.

If at all possible, trick it to the max once & once only, you know it pays dividends.

[CharlieB]

Zero headroom, annoyingly. We'd have considered a proper floor if so.

I should have said this is a home office. For me and possibly wife, if she can cope with the cold! Max a day a week and it wouldn't be all day, so it's not worth going all-out. I'll keep thinking about flooring. Some sort of matting makes sense but good point about stability of furniture.

[Mr Gus]

Well to be perfectly honest (too) & knowing the floor also wasn't perfectly level..

I bodged it to be strong enough to act as a workbench top part for about 120kg sensibly spread, OSB & tarp for my pumpkin carving work which was "delicate" banging them out for customers at up to 8 hours for a pumpkin design & cutting to a couple of millimetre thickness, (I couldn't spare time for mistakes, & as a roundish object also used angle wedges to make movement easier as I worked around, so i'm sure it wouldn't be that big a problem, just one to bear in mind, the recovery for the insulated jigsaw matting recovered well after years in situ, but furniture does tend to have harsher edges than a wire cage & mine was the bottom layer for an overlay of 150mm celotex so ensured good weight distribution compared to flat pack assembly furniture "type thing"

(obviously working on cutting veg flesh also required a cold room)

[MrPablo]

Perhaps an infrared heating panel above the working area?
That way you're not pumping heat into an uninsulated floor, plus the perceived heat is pretty instant. They aren't thick either, so shouldn't impact headroom.

[Mart]

Hi Charlie, not sure any of the following will help, but thought some ideas just to get you thinking, perhaps.

So, based on your flooring idea, we've actually covered the floor in our side extension (call it a garage, but it has 'normal' doors, so more a large storage room) with cheap foam floor mats, the jigsaw type. But the concrete slab does have 100mm of PIR underneath it. We also converted our back bedroom into a mini gym, and after considering lots of medium/expensive options, I simply put down a layer of those green cardboardy sheets that go under laminate flooring, then covered with a layer of, yes again, cheap foam jigsaws. I think the jigsaw cost was about £70 for the whole room, which is about 3.5m by 3.5m.

So your jigsaw mat idea is great, there are much cheaper ones available, but they are also half the thickness (what we bought). But you could try multi layers, to help smooth the floor, such as bubble wrap, or the foil with bubble wrap, type rolls you can get. Also very large and cheap sheets of polystyrene, but I thought the 'bubbly' rolls, might smooth out the floor better, but just guessing.

I've found products that explain what I'm thinking off, but they are just Google hits, not recommendations at all, again, just to get you thinking. And some E-bay search links, showing the number of options available to you, when it comes to foam floors.

3mm Acoustic Silver Wood Underlay from £1.13 per m2

2mm TimberTech Elite Wood & Laminate Flooring Underlay (10m²)

EcoTec Reflective Double Insulation FloorFoam Kit - 1.2m x 25m

ebay search - foam floor tiles

ebay search - heavy duty gym rubber flooring

[Mr Gus]

Halfords often do the jigsaw foam tiles for around £16 per pack, currently (often) 2 packs for £20

https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/halfor ... ub-4148780

**Further £5 off when join free Halfords Motoring Club @ Halfords ..likely still works**

Read the thread even though it technically expired the 2 for 20 is on again.

Direct halfords link, reviews also have better pictures than the stock image, lots of people using these for home gyms, either singularly or double depth for heavier weights...

Do the math & compare costs / viability. as a cold reducing test covering maybe, or if there is a smidge of height, use it as insulation & overlay it with OSB or the thick hardiebacker.

Any insulation has to endure heat, so hardiebacker would be part of the new floor sandwich, how much room do you have to play with without making folk trip all the time? & how big is the floor space?

[AGT]

No idea of budget but you could get an A2A air con unit and do heating and cooling.

Or for under £40 you could get a 2kW fan heater and smart plug, programme an on/off schedule and heat the room that way.
So it’s warm before you come in, in the morning and programmed to go off too.

Or a storage heater on a smart plug!

[Paul_F]

If the budget will stretch go for something like https://www.orionairsales.co.uk/compact ... 9396-p.asp - small heat pump so you also get air conditioning if needed, no F-gas ticket required, and very low energy consumption. If you're going to be using it as a full-time office then it's probably worth the extra up-front cost compared to resistive heat depending on what your heat loss actually is.

[Mr Gus]

Yes, indeed, ASHP if you can get through thick stone walls or similar, the most comfortable overkill to a situation possible in modern form

(but i'd still try & do something about that floor on the cheap as well)

https://cooleasy.co.uk/

I note there is a small samsung in their clearance section going cheap, (no returns) otherwise LG systems are an ok price.