Heritage heating deserves better than off-the-shelf answers
UK – John Felgate, Managing Director at Stiebel Eltron, and Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Owner of Elite Renewables, explain why every trustee, estate manager and diocesan committee they speak to is wrestling with the same problem when it comes to heritage heating.
Energy bills keep climbing. Net zero targets, whether set by the Church of England for 2030 or by a local authority’s climate emergency declaration, are no longer aspirational. And none of it can come at the expense of the fabric that makes these buildings worth protecting in the first place.
A medieval church, a Victorian museum, or a civic guildhall all face the same predicament as they’re typically made up of vast, draughty volumes that are expensive to heat and, increasingly, expensive to leave as they are. And crucially a building nobody can afford to heat often struggles to stay open.
Why off-the-shelf commercial heating fails here
The temptation, given a big building and a fixed budget, is to take a standard commercial system and scale it up. But it rarely works.
A gallery holding a stable temperature and humidity for a collection has almost nothing in common with a guildhall full of single-glazed glass, and both differ again from a parish church used on a Sunday and barely touched all week. Treat them the same and you get the same result each time, high running costs and a building that’s never quite warm enough.
The work that matters happens before any equipment is chosen. That means a proper feasibility study, room-by-room heat-loss calculations and a clear picture of how the building is actually used, service by service, exhibition by exhibition.
Only then should a system get designed around it, often zoned so that heat follows occupancy rather than warming an empty nave for the sake of it. Get that stage right and the waste falls away. Get it wrong and no amount of kit fixes it later. In heritage work, the design phase carries as much weight as the installation itself.
Where high-output heat pumps earn their place
Historic buildings ask for two things that don’t usually sit together: enough output to heat a large, leaky space, and near silence, whether for worship, for concentration in a reading room, or for the sensitive environment a collection needs.
That’s the gap our high-temperature heat pump range is built to close. Several units can work in tandem to scale output for larger loads, while each one stays well within its quiet, efficient operating range.
The high-temperature capability matters more than it might seem as older buildings rarely allow, or want, existing radiators and emitters ripped out.
Being able to deliver higher flow temperatures means much of that original infrastructure can stay exactly where it is. It also tends to be the detail that satisfies conservation officers and Diocesan Advisory Committees, who won’t sign off on anything that compromises the character or the calm of a listed space.
Approvals are part of the job, not a hurdle
Most trustees are less concerned with the technology than with the works, pipework chased through ancient stone, cabling run across a listed interior. And good design solves that.
Careful planning of pipe routes, plant placement and electrical upgrades, working through existing service voids wherever possible, means the fabric stays largely untouched. That’s also exactly the principle conservation bodies are looking for when they assess an application.
This only works with installers who build listed building consent and Historic England’s guidance into the process from day one, and who plan alongside conservation architects throughout. Our planning and specification teams work directly with installers on that basis.
A scheme a conservation officer can approve with confidence has to start at the first survey, well before anyone drafts a planning application.
Decarbonising Britain’s historic buildings is achievable. It takes treating each one as the specialised engineering challenge it actually is, with a design process to match.
