Scientific principles especially those relating to floor heating dictate that during the heating season, heat pumps move heat from the cool outdoors into the warm space and during the cooling season, heat pumps move heat from your cool house into the warm outdoors.
Underfloor heating remains a popular way of warming spaces. Questions are however raised on how this system functions during summer or warm weather.Various types of underfloor heating can also be used with cement floors, for example, you can embed radiant heating cables in cement floors to keep them toasty warm in the winter, Or you can use water heating tubes installed beneath the screed. One thing that is vital to note, is that in essence cement is not a flexible material, therefore during heating and cooling so expansion and contraction takes place and you run the risk of the floor cracking. However, using slow and gradual heating solutions and rather leaving them on for the duration of winter can minimise this risk as the floor is exposed to less erratic temperatures. Stability is key.
In order to run an efficient under floor system during warmer seasons, experts advise that you have a thermostat in place. Underfloor heating runs at a lower temperature than radiators, so to run the underfloor heating all the time, controlled by the thermostat makes sense. You use your thermostat to set the temperature you want. It is an efficient way of running the system. To understand why, imagine that your underfloor system is just like a very large radiator. The larger the radiator, the lower the temperature of the water within it (known as the flow temperature) needs to be in order to keep a room warm. Now imagine that that radiator is set in concrete, screed or some other solid material. In order for the heat to penetrate into the room, not only does the water need to warm the pipes it runs through, as with a regular radiator, it now also needs to warm that screed.
To get the pipes and the screed up to a certain temperature takes a lot of energy. Repeatedly turning the system on and off, as you would with regular radiators, will waste energy. However, once both pipes and screed are warm, they will hold the heat efficiently. Keeping your heating on constantly and your thermostat set low, means your room will stay nicely and consistently warm without having those very energy intensive peaks and troughs in temperature.