I’m staying in an apartment temporarily and I have absolutely no idea how it is heated. It’s a two-bedroom apartment. There is no thermostat. There are no vents. There is one radiator in the apartment’s living room, at the front and down the hall from the bedrooms, and one radiator in the bathroom.
I have felt every wall in my bedroom. All of them are cool. The floor is also a normal temperature.
And yet, despite it being at or below freezing most nights in the past month, I can be in my bedroom without a shirt on and be comfortable. It might be nice to be a little warmer, but I don’t feel cold or anything.
I am mystified. How is it being heated?
Are you on the ground floor? If not then maybe whatever is below you is really warm and the heat is coming up through the floor. But I guess in that case the floor would feel warmer.
I am not on the ground floor, and I thought maybe it would be some under-floor heating thing like you are saying, but I have walked all over the room in bare feet and felt no heat in the floor.
I have floor heating, and have set it to very low (almost off). It’s freezing outside, but in here I can walk around in t-shirt and barefoot. The floor does not feel warm, it just doesn’t feel really cold.
Maybe that’s the the same case for your apartment. Though I don’t know why there would also be radiators in the living room and bathroom. Maybe the heat from below is just warm enough to have the same effect.
If everything is already warm enough, there’s no need to add additional heat.
Checked the temperature of the ceiling?
The ceilings here are super high. I wouldn’t be able to reach it. Would a heated ceiling be all that efficient?
Sounds like a job for an IR camera or Polygondenimland? https://lemmy.world/post/25404145
Ambiently
Are you in a house or an apartment?
I’m on the fifth floor and pretty much never have to run my heat.
Apartment. First floor (second floor for Americans). Heat does rise, so maybe that’s it?
Yeah; rising heat, plus the extra insulation of neighbours sharing walls. It’s uniform enough that the walls/floor doesn’t feel any warmer than usual, but it makes a difference.
This is certainly helpful. I am in an apartment that I’m certain has no floor heating. I hardly ever have to turn on the heater (gets as low as about 13-15 degrees sometimes). During the warmer days, I have to open my windows or else it gets extremely humid.
Maybe an infrared heater somewhere? They can look like a painting or whatnot, while actually serving as a heater first and foremost.
Wait until summer. It’ll become hell.
You are in the UK now so the chance of it being underfloor heating is very slim indeed unless you are in a new build from the last 5 - 10 years or so, even then I would doubt it though.
It is probably a combination of the amount of insulation we put in walls, floors and roof spaces along with the fact you downstairs neighbour or neighbours if there is a basement will be using theirs and obviously heat rises.
I know many people here that live in flats above other people that will never switch their heating on and live comfortably.
It is likely that those radiators are your only heat sources coupled with presumably a gas boiler to serve both the radiators and your hot water taps. There will be some kind of controls for it somewhere though, not all systems with have a thermostat in place. My current house has 3 radiators with no thermostat. It is either on or off or you can set time intervals for it to switch on and off by itself but there is no temperature based control.
Something, somewhere, is on fire. The heat energy from that fire is variously converted, stored, transported all the way to your apartment. Once it arrives, it is converted back into heat energy. This is commonly accomplished by forcing electrical energy through a conductive filament.
The air in your apartment absorbs that energy, becoming “hot”. When that air contacts your skin, transferring some heat energy to it, nerves inside your skin activate, sending a tiny electrochemical pulse to your brain.
That tiny pulse of energy bounces around patterns of interconnected neurons in your brain, forming a sensation of warmth, which is experienced consciously.
The nature of consciousness is left as an exercise for the reader.
British magic, specifically.
Good insulation in walls and ceiling
I would have to guess that your apartment is being heated by radiating heat from other apartments (probably below you) as well as insulated by good quality walls and windows, and then this is supplemented by radiators when deemed necessary by some kind of sensor.
It’s also possible you have underfloor heating if you live in a newer apartment in a country where that’s common. But it wouldn’t be my first assumption.
It sounds like my old place. So long as you don’t have a corner unit you’re not being heated. You’re being sheltered from the cold by the surrounding units. The baseboard heaters are only there to touch up if you crack a window or something.
It can be heat from surrounding units, especially those below you. Heat rises. There is a 15 degree difference between my upstairs and downstairs sometimes.
Perhaps adjacent/lower apartments are heated and are leaking enough heat to you.
Would the walls and floor still be cold if they were doing that? I honestly have no idea how that would work.
Actually yes, because “warm air” and “warm solid surface” are at two different temperatures to us due to unequal heat transfer.
The walls just have to be slightly above the air temperature to heat it up, and they may feel a bit cold anyway.
