We need heating around 200 days of the year, but during the warmer summer months, a little cooling is needed to take the edge off those hot days. For years we have known the human body is most comfortable when radiantly heated, such as standing in the sun, but recent understandings show that cooling the body radiantly is also preferred to moving air as typical air conditioning does.
For 40 years Austrian company Variotherm has been perfecting indoor climate comfort. Central Heating New Zealand is proud to be associated with this innovative company and the products they offer.
Variotherm’s Module wall and ceiling cooling panels are an ideal enhancement for room cooling. By positioning water pipes in the walls or ceiling of your home enables heated or chilled water to provide gentle radiant comfort without noise, drafts, or dust movement.
Wall and Ceiling Panels Benefits:
- Large surface cooling and heating
- Energy-efficient and environmentally friendly
- Completely silent – no noisy air conditioning
- Radiant cooling – no cold draughts on your neck
- Tested for fire resistance and certified for their biological properties
- Flexible design options for all ceiling structures
- Ready to install
- Acoustic friendly panels available
- Pipe connections are 100% tight
- Heating and cooling manifolds are fully assembled, and pressure tested
- Low energy costs thanks to efficient low-temperature systems
- 10-year guarantee
Why surface cooling is so effective
Comfort is not only created through the air temperature in the room, but the temperature of the surfaces enclosing the room is of equal importance. Cooling surfaces offer the advantage of gentle radiation exchange between the cooling ceiling/wall surface and the human body. Other warmer objects in the room (floor, furnishings, etc) also radiate heat to this cooled surface, and since thermal radiation always flows from the warmer to colder objects, this loss of heat reduces the surface temperatures providing gentle cooling within the room.
Variotherm’s ceiling and wall panels are great for smaller applications but excel at maximizing efficiency where large heated or cooled surfaces are required. The increased levels of comfort that this radiant type system provides at higher room temperatures also result in reducing your running costs.
The Variotherm system requires less energy to make a person feel comfortable. The temperature of the water circulated through the pipes will be lower than other hydronic systems when heating and higher when cooling but will achieve the same or a better level of comfort. Savings of around 6% in operating costs for every 1-degree cooler in heating and 1 degree warmer in cooling can be achieved, resulting in a total energy reduction of up to 30% when compared with conventional heating and cooling systems.
Radiant cool room
A customer building in Christchurch approached us to help with warming them home. They opted for underfloor central heating split into two zones with two manifolds and powered by two Air-to-Water Chofu heat pumps.
When talking further about the customer's comfort desires for their home, they mentioned they preferred having a cooled bedroom but did not enjoy the noise or movement of air that they had experienced from traditional fan coil cooling methods. We suggested Variotherm module ceiling cooling panels that provide radiant cooling, and they were delighted with this idea.
We installed six 2,000x600m Variotherm panels connected as 3 loops through a 3-way Variotherm manifold and our customers are enjoying the view of their garden while relaxing on their bed in a perfectly cooled room.
