What is Central Heating?

As the name suggests, a central heating system provides warmth for the interior of a building. It can also be combined with other systems, to control the temperature. These systems are commonly used in colder climates, to help heat homes. They are also found in most commercial buildings, including high-rise residential, office buildings, shopping malls, and hotels.

Central heating systems do their job, by distributing heat evenly to every area of your home through a network of pipes. These pipes are connected to radiators in each room or can be looped under the floor if you have underfloor heating. Both systems provide you with heating by releasing a gentle rate of heat to each room.

To begin with, natural gas must enter your home through a pipe in the street. Stored in chemical form, inside the gas, is the heat that will warm up your home.

The boiler burns the gas to make hot jets. This then heats a copper pipe, which contains water that bends back and forth, through the gas jets, with the intention of picking up the maximum amount of heat. This process makes the copper pipe a heat exchanger, with the water flowing over it, receiving the heat from the gas.

An electric pump then pushes the heated water through the system, including the upper floor levels. The water flows around a closed circuit, delivering water to each radiator through the system’s pipework. The hot water enters the radiator at one side, before leaving it at the other. As each radiator is giving off heat, the water is cooler when it leaves, than when it enters. With the water significantly cooler, after it has passed through all the radiators, it returns to the boiler to repeat the process and become heated again. Essentially, the water is a heat-transporting device that transfers the heat from the gas in the boiler, to each radiator.

A thermostat mounted in a communal area of the home, monitors the boiler’s activity. When the temperature drops below a certain temperature, the boiler will switch on to fulfil the demand for hot water. This also works in the opposite way, with the boiler switching off when the temperature gets too high on the thermostat. Throughout this cycle, waste gases leave the boiler through a flue pipe.

Installing a new central heating system could cost you from £3,000 to £4,000, although, there are several variables that could have an impact on your individual cost. These range from the boiler brand, type and size, the style and size of radiators or underfloor heating, the sophistication of heating controls and the ease of installation.

While this might seem like a hefty upfront cost, modern boilers are highly efficient as they use less fuel to deliver the same level of heat as older boilers. It is quite common for them to have outstanding efficiencies of over 92%. This means for every £1 spent on heating, only 8p is lost through wasted heat. In the long run, this could add up to considerable savings on your energy bills when you consider that older boilers only have an energy efficiency rating of 60-70%.