Jan: The Small Builder Who Stopped Specifying Radiators

Heritage Homes, South Cheshire. A few units a year, built carefully, with the planet in mind. And a heating spec most volume housebuilders would do well to copy.

There's a version of small building that the industry doesn't talk about much. A handful of houses a year, no marketing department, no sales suite, no glossy brochure. The customer turns up because someone they know lived in the last one. The build takes twice as long as a volume site because everything is detailed properly. The houses outlast the builder.

That's what Jan does, and that's the version of the industry where the most interesting heating decisions are being made.

“We are small builders. We like to do technical stuff. We like to do things that people don't like to do, with the planet going south, if you want to call it that. So we thought, the way things are going, houses have to be more efficient and stay efficient. Not just for a few years, but a long time forward.”

That sentence does a lot of work. It tells you the brief Jan sets himself before he sets a brief for anyone else.

The Brief Most Builders Don't Write Down

Heritage Homes builds a small number of high specification houses a year in South Cheshire. The thing Jan keeps coming back to, in the way only an owner-operator builder does, is staying efficient. Not passing Building Control. Not hitting an EPC band on completion. Performing properly in fifteen years' time, in a real house, occupied by a real family who don't think about U-values.

The fabric does most of the work. The walls are airtight. The insulation is generous. There's an MVHR system pressurising the house at low pressure and changing the air volume every two days. The heating system has to fit on top of all of that without fighting it.

“What we've done is we've made sure the house itself is fairly airtight. That gives you a different problem in condensation. So what you need is a passive air system, which the house has got. This is what's pressurising the house with a very low pressure, but it's pushing air. Our passive heat system actually changes the volume in this house every two days.”

That's the thinking of a builder who has read the regulations, then read past them to the physics underneath. Tight house, mechanical ventilation, low temperature heat. Three components that all have to behave.

The heat source is an air source heat pump. The emitters are where most builders default to whatever the plumber has used before. Jan didn't.

The Surface Area Argument

The decision Jan made is one of those decisions that's obvious only after someone has made it.

“When you look at the different forms of heating available to you, heating through a skirting board gives you almost the same surface area you need to heat a room. It's an obvious choice when you think about it. All you now have to do is make it work.”

A heat pump runs at low flow temperatures. Low flow temperatures need more emitter surface area to deliver the same heat output. There are three real options for that surface area. Underfloor heating, which is brilliant on a new ground floor and difficult above it. Tall radiators, which work but eat wall space and dictate furniture layouts. Or ThermaSkirt, which runs along the wall the room already has, at a low temperature, with no visual presence.

Heritage Homes does all three. Underfloor heating on the ground floor, where the slab is being poured anyway and the floor build-up is part of the design. ThermaSkirt to the first and second floors, where lifting the floors for underfloor heating would add weeks to the programme and headroom-eating depth to the build-up.

That's the textbook spec for a low temperature, heat pump ready new build. It's the spec that's quietly emerging across the better end of the small builder market.

What it's not is the spec most volume housebuilders are putting in.

The Loft Problem

The most interesting room in any Heritage Homes house is the second storey loft space. It's also the room where most builders quietly compromise.

Loft conversions and second storey rooms in the eaves come with stubby walls. Walls that run from the floor up to where the ceiling angles in. On a typical pitched roof, those walls are often less than a metre tall before the slope cuts them off. Sometimes considerably less.

That's a problem the radiator industry doesn't have a clean answer to. A radiator needs a vertical wall to sit on. A stubby wall can't take a tall radiator. And to get the same output from a short, low radiator, you end up specifying something three or four metres long, which then has to live somewhere on the floorplate. Often the only wall it'll fit on is the only wall the customer wanted clear for a wardrobe, or a chest, or a window seat.

Builders solve it the same way every time. Compromise the room or compromise the radiator. Push furniture into corners that don't suit it. Accept a cold spot under the eaves and hope the customer doesn't notice in February.

ThermaSkirt doesn't have that conversation. The skirting runs around the perimeter of the room, including the stubby walls under the eaves, at the height the wall actually is. The output comes from running length, not vertical surface area. A four metre stubby wall delivers heat from four metres of skirting. The room gets warmed evenly. The furniture goes wherever the customer wants it.

That's not a marketing claim. It's basic geometry. And on a Heritage Homes second storey, it's the difference between a usable room and a compromised one.

The Furniture Problem, Solved Quietly

There's a beat in the transcript where Jan starts thinking like a buyer rather than a builder, and it's worth pausing on.

“What you've got is you can access any part of the room. And when you're doing that, if you're a prospective purchaser, you're now thinking, I can put my furniture here, there, or there.”

That's the sales argument that Heritage Homes' purchasers feel before they can articulate. They walk through the house and the rooms feel bigger than they should. There's no quiet anxiety about where the bed has to go because of the rad. There's no sideboard pinned away from the wall because the column rad sits in front of it. The wall is just wall, all the way round.

Builders don't tend to think about this because they're not in the room when the customer is mentally placing the furniture. The ones who do think about it, like Jan, end up specifying differently.

The Heating Behaviour

The other thing Jan kept coming back to, in his measured way, is what the system actually does on a windy Cheshire afternoon.

“When the temperature goes hot or cold outside, the heating does exactly the same thing. It compensates for it. It brings the heating up. The temperatures are fairly stable inside the house. All you do is nothing. You let the system do the work for you.”

That's the emergent property of pairing a tight, well ventilated, MVHR-supported building with a low temperature, low water volume emitter system. The fabric stops the building losing heat in lumps. The MVHR regulates moisture and air quality without ripping warmth out of the rooms. The skirting holds a low, even temperature continuously. When the weather changes, the system adjusts gently rather than playing catch up.

“In a normally centrally heated house, you find cold corners because the heat hasn't got there yet. When you're employing ThermaSkirt, you find yourself walking around the room, there's no cold spots. They're missing.”

Cold spots are the thing customers can't articulate but will always feel. The heating industry tends to design around the temperature of the air in the middle of the room. The customer feels the temperature of the corner, the floor, the window reveal, the bit behind the sofa. ThermaSkirt addresses that perimeter directly, because the perimeter is where the heat is being delivered.

The Hot Water Detail

There's a small, telling detail Jan mentions that has nothing to do with the heating system itself but tells you everything about how he builds.

“One of the design considerations is how to get the hot water around the entire building. What we do is we bring hot water and cold water to a central place. The distance between here and the rest of the building is about the same. So when you've got hot water in one bathroom, you can get hot water in another bathroom without having to rob somebody of that resource.”

That's the kind of thinking that doesn't show up on a brochure but shows up the first time two showers are running at once and neither one drops to a trickle. It's the same instinct that drives the heating spec. Get the engineering right at first principles, and the customer experience falls out of it for free.

The Manufacturer Relationship

Small builders don't have a procurement department. The technical support they get from the manufacturer is the technical support they get full stop.

“One important consideration in choosing ThermaSkirt was the technical support on the phone, over emails, and the questions were also on the website. Any clarification we needed was there, and it was technical clarification for us as well. They worked out what was the best thing for our house and how we should do it, and we followed their advice.”

That's the bit volume housebuilders take for granted because they have specifiers and consultants on the payroll. For Jan, the manufacturer's design office was effectively his specifier. The phone calls, the email threads, the room by room advice. All of it part of the spec.

This is where the small UK manufacturer model actually pays off. ThermaSkirt is designed in Atherton, made in Atherton, and supported by a technical team you can ring up. There isn't a re-sale layer between the engineer and the builder. The advice is the product, in a way most heating brands don't quite manage.

What He's Telling Other Builders

The last paragraph of the transcript is worth quoting in full, because it's the closest thing to a peer-to-peer industry message you'll get from a small builder.

“Once other builders have realised, I still got to put pipes in, whatever I do. I've got this business of now I don't have to see the radiators. I've already said to the builders, look, when you're doing central heating, think about a different thing. Think about heating the skirting boards. The benefits are no radiators, and you haven't got to put skirting boards down.”

That last line is worth reading twice. No radiators, and you haven't got to put skirting boards down. The skirting is the heating. The plumber and the joiner do one job between them rather than two jobs in sequence. The cost line on the spreadsheet that used to be skirting board supply and fix becomes part of the heating package. The room is finished without the second trade ever turning up.

That's not a feature. That's a programme implication. And on a small site, where the programme is the thing that breaks builders, it's the kind of detail that compounds.

The Wider Pattern

Jan is the kind of customer who tells you where the heating industry is genuinely heading, because he's already there.

Tight fabric. Low temperature heat source. Mechanical ventilation. Low volume, fast response emitters following the perimeter of the room. The whole system doing one coordinated job rather than four separate jobs colliding with each other.

The volume housebuilder market will get there in five to ten years, dragged by the Future Homes Standard and by commercial pressure from the better end of the heat pump retrofit sector. The small, careful builders are already there. They got there by reading the regulations, then reading past them.

Heritage Homes builds a few houses a year. They'll outlast the volume sites going up around them. The heating spec is one of the reasons.

“This is where I come to have a good look outside. This is what really makes it my favourite room. I can stand, watch open fields, and the heating is ThermaSkirt all the way around.”

That's the test. The thing that finishes the room is the view. The thing that makes the room work is invisible.

Which is, in the end, what good engineering is supposed to do.