Does electric underfloor heating meet the Healthy Homes heating standard?
Sometimes, but usually not in the room that counts. Here is the detail, because the answer turns on a number.
The healthy homes heating standard applies to one room: the main living room. It requires one or more fixed heaters that can heat and maintain that room to 18°C, and it sets out which heater types are acceptable. Bedrooms, bathrooms and hallways are not covered by the heating standard at all.
Electric underfloor heating is on the acceptable list, with conditions. It must be fixed, it must have a thermostat, and its capacity must be between 1.5kW and 2.4kW. The 2.4kW ceiling is the problem. It comes from a wider rule that electric heaters other than heat pumps are unacceptable where the room's required heating capacity is more than 2.4kW.
Run the arithmetic on a real living room. At the 150W per square metre Heatwell recommends under tile, 2.4kW buys you 16 square metres of heated floor. A typical Auckland living room is larger than that, and the capacity the standard calculates for it is usually higher than 2.4kW. In that situation electric underfloor heating cannot meet the standard on its own, and a heat pump is what the room needs.
So the honest position is this. If you are a landlord trying to satisfy the heating standard in a main living room, underfloor heating is probably not your compliance answer, and we would rather tell you that now than after the floor is down.
What underfloor heating does well in a rental is everything the standard does not reach: the bathroom, the ensuite, the bedroom floor. Those rooms have no heating requirement. A warm dry bathroom floor is one of the few improvements tenants notice immediately and landlords do not have to maintain.
The big deal is less mold creation. Bathrooms and bedrooms both create a lot of moister that extraction fans struggle to deal with. Underfloor heating will both dry and area and create an environment where water vapour will not condense.
Every property is different, and the required capacity depends on the room's dimensions, windows, insulation and location. Use the heating assessment tool on the Tenancy Services website to get the figure for your property, then talk to us about what makes sense in the rooms the standard does not cover.
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