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Re: my earlier toot.
Honest question - is a "utility room" some sort of Midwestern thing?
Talking about how to avoid running ducts through attics, it occurred to me that it might be.
Here, if you don't have a basement, there's usually a room with your furnace/air handler, water heater, and washer/dryer. Plumbing often routes there, too.
Sometimes it's less of a room and more of a closet, but we can't just stick the washer and water heater in the garage 'cause they'll freeze.
@TechConnectify uk here. of the last seven places i've lived at, five have had every non-boiler appliance in the kitchen. the other two, the washer /dryer got their own dedicated room.
the boiler is always in an airing cupboard. never been in a place where there's utility stuff in the attic.
a dedicated utility room is always the system i'd prefer, but that might just be because it was like that in the place i grew up
@snailerotica @TechConnectify I'm also in the UK, and also have lived in houses with utility rooms. Smaller houses don't (and I've never seen a house in North America that's anywhere near what counts as a "smaller house" here). In contrast, IME the water heater is often in a cupboard in the kitchen, our modern water heaters are tiny wall-mounted things, unlike North American furnaces.
The only utility I've ever had in a roof space was a header tank to pressurise the hot water system.
@davecturner @snailerotica A huge factor in the NA/UK HVAC divide is how common hydronic heating is.
Since that's more-or-less the default for you, combi-boilers are a slam dunk.
Since so much of the US benefits from air conditioning, even way up here where it gets life-threateningly cold every winter, we largely ditched it in favor of forced air heating and cooling, which necessitates a separate water heater.
@TechConnectify @davecturner @snailerotica Amusingly, with some newer refrigerants, hydronic heating would make sense again... with heat pumps.
Some companies in the UK are selling in-place conversions for boilers to using heat pumps for the heat.
@lispi314 @davecturner @snailerotica Yep! Those are really intriguing and I think they'll be great for relatively easy retrofits.
But I'd wager as heatwaves get worse, people are gonna want cooling at least in one room. Luckily a basic mini-split can add that quite easily - but once you get it in the living room, you might want it in the bedrooms, too, and perhaps American HVAC history repeats itself across the pond...
@TechConnectify @lispi314 @snailerotica I worked in an office building with hydronic _cooling_ once. It wasn't very good tbh. Fortunately it was designed assuming every person would have 1-2 CRT monitors and when I worked there we'd all moved to LCDs so cooling was only rarely needed.