Anyone have experience of warm air heating?

Just looked at a house to buy (to then rent out- I live in a house that comes with my job). What’s putting me off is the single glazing and warm air heating. I like the sound of warm air heating but this system is nearly 30years old so must be very inefficient and on its last legs. It looks like you can replace them with another as the alternative would be to fit radiators and plumb the whole house.

Anyone have one/ use one?

We have modern ducted air heating in Oz, it’s crap. Utter crap, I skipped over anything in the UK with it when I was renting I’d also not touch anything single glazed with a barge pole (especially with a poor rep heating system)

Had it in two houses I’ve owned and eventually replaced it in both. I didn’t find it offered any advantages over heating with rads (apart from not needing to put them up) and the gas bills dropped when replaced.

If its for a house you are renting out my first thought is, if it works why worry, but my second is that it might put some people off.

NOISY

USELESS

REALLY REALLY REALLY EXPENSIVE TO REPLACE

HUUUUUGE ELECTRIC BILLLS

Thanks. To clarify- this is a gas system not leccy. Still putting me off I think. The house is no bargain as has been lived in by elderly couple and needs significant modernising to make attractive for the London commuter tenant it could attract.

we used to have it back home. would have been about 25years that the heater unit was on it’s last legs, and impossible to get all the replacement fans etc.
binned it and replaced with storage heaters.
only real bonus was that when it got trashed, the heater cupboard became a bonus cupboard, and the ducts became a handy way for passing stuff like CAT5 and Coax cables between floors, since there was effectively a central core of the house that was heater cupboard, airing cupboard above that and the water tank in the loft above that.

I rented a house for 10 years with it. Bought a house a couple of years ago also with it. It is an old system but has not gone wrong for us.

The only upsides to it are that it heats bits of the house very quickly and you don’t need ugly radiators cluttering up the place. We are saving up to get it replaced. A heating engineer two doors down said it’ll cost 3-5k to do this. Perhaps just factor that in the offer?

They seem quite keen on the idea in Canada from what I’ve seen on “Holmes on homes”

andytherocketeer fixing his LAN earlier…

as for warm air heating – had it in last place – what everybody else said – wouldn’t want it again – (ps burner/air fan uses electric)

edit – I suspect Canadians have proper wall /home insulation, our 1970’s built place did not(?)

should have mentioned. ours was rubbish. noisy, since it’s metal ducting within a cavity that’s basically chipboard and plasterboard.

and in winter, always needed as supplementary portable calor gas heater.

that central core with a heater below and hot water tank above was quite warm though. shame about the rooms. least my grandmother was good at making crochet blankets.

I dare say that modern stuff is much better. Our would be abotu 40 years old now if it were still there.

They like it in the US because the ducting doubles as aircon vents in the summer. But they don’t seem to give a flying shit about energy costs, from what I can tell. Two things I just found out about two family members who live in Wisconsin where it is -20C or colder for half the winter and 30 or more for half the summer.

1) The walls on my in-laws’ house are about 6″ thick and until they replaced the siding recently they had NO insulation at all. So it was a layer of plasterboard and a layer of wood, in -20C. Even now in the winter the insulation is awful – you can feel the heat from the cranked up rads on one side and the cold on the other as it makes its way merrily outside the house.

2) My sis-in-law in the same town bought a house recently, the only water heater is an electric immersion heater in an un-insulated tank in the basement, and it’s on ALL THE TIME. Talk about burning money.. this is apparently the way they do things. Fitting a hot water jacket seems to be a novel idea.

Both these things are apparently completely unsurprising, even the norm.

We have it in our house – its good and bad.
It works, warms house quickly great for drying clothes infront of a vent, no radiators etc.

There is also no thermal mass like a radiator so it cools down quckly.
Ours is quiet as mounted to concerete floor.

I think the big leccy bills comes from the fact there is no way to use the gas to heat the water so all hot water is electric immersion.

However it is difficult to control as there are no thermostatic vents, and as ducting to the vents heat up they “chimney” the hot air along those ducts so they get hotter. This means that it wont heat the floor the boiler is on. Hot air cannot be persuaded to go up to ceiling height, along a bit and then down again.

We offered 5K less than asking when buying.
We are looking at quotes of £8+ to replace with a standard system.
1 – to get heat downstairs
2 – to remove an obsticle to buying should we decide to sell.

N

We used to live in a house that used to have it

The neighbours had still got it and they thought it was OK. It worked but there were a lot of vents throughout the house – in the floor, ceiling and walls – and a significant cupboard with the heating unit in it. I guess if you’ve not used a better form of heating it would be perfectly adequate but these days people expect more.

Have put my uncle’s house on the market this year and buyers want every room in white, fitted kitchen/bathroom, central heating, double glazing, a porch and a nice garden that doesn’t require any maintenance 😕

Conversely I’ve lived in two houses with it and think it’s great. Loads more wall space. That being said a boiler replacement is not cheap so you’d want to factor that into costs. Also as someone else said it won’t heat water. Well some will but it costs extra. However if you’re renting it out you won’t have to worry about bills. Also great at reducing condensation if tenants insist on drying clothes indoors.

The single glazing would be more of a concern.

I’d get some money knocked of the price on the basis that you’ll have to reglaze and the boiler will need replacing soon. Then when it does die decide if the cost of converting to water is more or less than replacing the boiler.

We’ve had it for years. Original gas air unit packed up (25 years old) and the new one cost about £700 to replace I think. The newer one is slightly more efficient in terms of the heat it generates.
It’s noisier than gas rads and doesn’t stay warm for long when it goes off. The upsides are that the place warms very quickly. We have it set to come on 15 minutes before we get up. For a household like ours where we’re out a lot, it’s fine as we have it on for a few hours a day in winter.
As said previously, very handy for drying washing in front of a vent. We’ve got double glazing, loft and cavity wall insulation. I remember it being very cold in winter before we had them.

We have it in our house – its good and bad.
It works, warms house quickly great for drying clothes infront of a vent, no radiators etc.

There is also no thermal mass like a radiator so it cools down quckly.
Ours is quiet as mounted to concerete floor.

Yep my grandparents had it and found the same advantages – your house heats up loads quicker than with radiators, and the extra wall space is a bonus in smaller rooms. There’s wasn’t noisy either, and reliable IIRC.

Does it matter? Two and a half grand to replace with a whole new combi, rads and controls. Bit less for full new double glazing. What’s that as a percentage of a house cost in London commuter belt?

Whole estate where i used to live had it installed, gas with electric fans, power went off and so did gas supply, as a safety thing.

also worked in a few houses that have it fitted and one i riped it out of, absolute nightmare, steel boxes under floor feeding to a huge steel box blower/burner, lots of dust if not used often, open vents above doorways so noisy and a fire risk smoke just goes through them, then there is the big holes if you take the boxes out i used one for a customer to hide a safe in.

Love it.

We had a central “boiler” that did hot air and water on separate circuits.

It was very quiet when running (it adjoined the kitchen/diner and you couldn’t hear it.

There is very little to go wrong with it so servicing and maintenance is easy/cheap.

It heats the house very quickly as you are pushing hot air to where it is needed, not heating up water, to heat some metal, to heat air which then has to circulate.

No radiators taking up wall space.

Downsides?

When you switch it off, the house cools down pretty quickly (see above about hot metal).

Err… that’s about it.

Parents house has it.

WASTE OF TIME

from a gas enginers perspective… dangerous as a lion in your bathroom.. stay well clear..

We had an AS heat pump. Awful. Went hot/cold/hot/cold ad infinitum. It was cheap to run but just when you needed it the firkin thing stopped working as it was too cold. Not a fan of any air heating systems, previous one was gas on same system.

Had it, but found it noisy,only heated the two closest rooms properly. This was a very old system also. Mine heated the water as well. I wouldn’t choose to have it, but I wouldn’t let it stop me buying a house that did.

You could always opt for electric panel heaters with fan boosters. You might not need to go gas central heating, depending how you like to use the system. My utility bills have never been cheaper since moving and having no gas now.

had it as part of air conditioning system. it was great BUT that was for a mega-insulated apartment in a temperate climate so we hardly ever used it.

Others have pointed out all the pros and cons, but to expand on what totalshell said, here is my experience:

Rented a house with it, sharing with a mate. Heating would have an immediate effect, but little capacity, so house would fluctuate between cosy and cold very quickly, but I’m sure with a bit of regulation we would have sorted this. My house-mate was doing a bit of freelance work and also applying for jobs, so was in the house pretty much all the time. He started getting headaches. We got a plumber in to repair a tiny gas leak for our cooker and asked him to have a quick look at the heating too.

He condemned it on the spot 😮

Apparently the burner was all clogged up so was producing lots of carbon monoxide, but also the heat exchanger was cracked, so the CO was then getting pumped through the house rather than going out the flue. This was mid November and the plumber said that my mate would have been dead by Christmas without any action 😯

Landlord then got a traditional system installed in its place, probably concerned that he hadn’t supplied a gas safety certificate and didn’t want to get sued….

So, if you keep it, make sure it’s maintained regularly.

Cheers, Rich

midlifecrashes – Member

Does it matter? Two and a half grand to replace with a whole new combi, rads and controls. Bit less for full new double glazing. What’s that as a percentage of a house cost in London commuter belt?
Posted 15 hours ago # Report-Post

£2.5k ? Seems far too cheap, I’m paying £3k for rads, boiler and controls to replace an existing system. Putting the whole lot in, running pipes etc surely be much more expensive, or am I being ripped off?

my cat loves it.

my cat preferred being stretched out in front of the 2 bar electric heater

Just looked at a house to buy (to then rent out- I live in a house that comes with my job). What’s putting me off is the single glazing and warm air heating. I like the sound of warm air heating but this system is nearly 30years old so must be very inefficient and on its last legs. It looks like you can replace them with another as the alternative would be to fit radiators and plumb the whole house.

You are renting the house out, what do you care what it costs to run?

FWIW – hot air warms up a house very quickly

Have lived in / owned two properties (both flats) with warm air heating. I’d never, ever, do it again.

Noise from the fan was noticeable & the ductwork acted as speaker tubes to disperse conversations, TV programs, the dog barking, your flat mate getting it on with whoever throughout.

Both were open flue systems, which should be ok, but it always sowed the seed in my mind when going to bed of “Will I wake up tomorrow?”, particularly as the furnace parts were both situated just outside of the bedroom. Stormy autumnal nights were generally viewed as a gamble with the guy with the scythe.

On top of an annual service, there’s generally a filter to clean every month or so. You can’t buy the filters so you end up washing them in the sink.

As others have said, our flats never got properly warm, so as soon as the heating went off at night it was straight to bed in the winter. I also found the heat to be quite dry – a bit like you get in a portakabin with dimplex heaters.

For some unknown reason (cost? Puritanical 70’s hang-ups), there’s always a room or two with no heating. Generally this’ll be the bathroom. But we had a spare bedroom in Gosforth that could’ve doubled as a morgue.

It WILL be riddled with asbestos – in Gosforth the cupboard door where it lived had a huge sheet of asbestolux crudely nailed to its back as a token to fire prevention. Every gasket, piece of duct insulation and flue pipe looked suspicious, along with the dry lining sheets in any wall where there were ducts. In our Brum flat the furnace cupboard was made entirely of the stuff.

Their chosen mode of failure is threefold: thermocouple £cheap and diy-able (probably not legally?); Fan £moderate, spares can be a PITA to source. Diy-able (don’t breathe that in!); Heat exchanger £mucho mucho grande! Can amusingly fail in a way that is terminal to both the furnace and yourself, as combustion gases get evenly distributed about the property.

My advice: get someone to remove it (all of it) & throw a combi at it. That, or find somewhere else.