Hot water pipes overheating room

[AliG]

The media room in my house has always been the hottest room. Indeed the heating had never been on.

 

For ages I thought it was the heat from the AV cabinet which has 100s of watts of equipment running constantly.

 

Then when I was out with the IR camera last week I discovered the real issue.

 

The pipes from the boiler to the swimming pool heater run in the stepped ceiling in the media room. I believe that they are insulated with armaflex, but still the IR camera says this area sits at around 28C.

 

The pool heater runs on quite short cycles so these pipes stay constantly hot. It is 15C outside and just shy of 27C in this room at the moment, it was 26 before I put on the projector. The rest of the house is sitting at 23-24C depending on the amount of solar gain in the room.

 

What's the best way to insulate the ceiling and stop the heat getting into the room?

 

I was wondering if I could just stuff the space with loose fill rock wool insulation?

 

 

Edited August 13, 2019 by AliG

[daiking]

How big is the space?

 

Some multifoil insulation in addition to traditional bulk insulation may help but will depend on the config.

[AliG]

It's about 600mm wide and 300mm high. But I need to check how close the pipes are to the ceiling to see if I can get anything underneath them.

 

There is a speaker nearby in the ceiling so I will see if I can take it down and get a better look. My wife won't lie me messing around with it.

 

Having checked again with the IR camera, a lot of heat is also coming from the AV rack also. It backs on to the utility room, and I often leave the back door ajar, but that doesn't make much difference. I need to see if I can get a vent in closer to the top and maybe insulate the stud wall between it and the media room.

 

The media room is the only room in the house with no opening window as it just has a narrow high level window. Even then I think it is better that I try and insulate the pipes and save on heating rather than lose the heat outside.

[Dreadnaught]

@AliG, in addition to what you are considering, I wonder if you have a loop of UFH in that room that you can somehow run independently. Could you use it (unheated) to redistribute heat from that room to other parts of the house? Just an idea.

[AliG]

The UFH isn't set up that way unfortunately.

 

One thing I already fixed though is that a loop to the hall/WC runs through the room. The WC is the coldest room in the house (north facing, obscured glass and outside walls/roof) so we had to separate this loop from the hall thermostat and put a wireless thermostat into the WC. Somehow the wireless controller was confused and running every morning irrespective of the actual temperature. I fixed it in time honoured tradition by switching the controller off then on again.

 

I had hoped that this would help but it made no discernible difference.

 

The other thing I did was the heating installers insulated all their pipes, but the pool guys didn't, so I insulated the last 5m of pipe in the plant room hoping that this would cause less heating demand through these pipes.

 

I have one other thing which I plan to try, which is tuning down the boiler. At the moment it runs at around 61C with the hot water tank set at around 57C. The boiler temperature drives the flow temperature to the pool and UFH manifolds, so if I can turn this down a bit I might reduce heat loss that occurs in the ceiling voids where these pipes run. I have been working on doing this without affecting the supply of hot water.

Edited August 13, 2019 by AliG

[AliG]

Actually looking at the temps in the house today, I have two other rooms that are constantly a little warmer. These are the bedroom and Gym where the UFH manifolds are.

 

Depending on what is running, water flows to these manifolds when there is no heating demand. Conduction through the pipes causes the manifold itself to warm up.

 

Again this is why I would like to reduce the boiler temp as it would reduce the flow temp in the system, but I was wondering if anyone has ended up insulating their UFH manifolds.

 

A lot depends on how low people think it is safe to run the DHW. I know 60C is recommended, but if I could run it closer to 50 then I could reduce the boiler temp to the low 50s and probably reduce heat losses quite a bit.