Douay Martyrs School, London Borough of Hillingdon
Douay Martyrs School, London Borough of Hillingdon
The Douay Martyrs Roman Catholic School, located in the London Borough of Hillingdon, is a secondary school and sixth form with academy status. Serving 1,500 students, the school has two campuses, Arrowsmith and Cardinal Hume, located on either side of Long Lane in Ickenham. The school’s original building, located at the Arrowsmith campus, dates back to 1962. The decision was taken in 2016 to completely refurbish the heating in the building’s sports hall, to bring it up to modern standards and improve efficiency.
Objectives and Challenges:
Despite its name, the sports hall is a multi-functional space used not only for sports activities such as tennis and basketball but also for school assemblies and exams. With wooden floors, towering clear walls,
and shallow windows immediately beneath the high ceiling, this vast space was previously warmed by underfloor heating but this system failed in 2016, resulting in leaks and floor damage.
The school didn’t want a like-for-like replacement, because the floor damage had shaken its confidence in underfloor heating. The usual alternative to floor heating, wall-mounted radiators, was also ruled out because the walls needed to be kept clear for safety.
The Solution:
The fact that wall-mounted radiators and underfloor heating were both ruled out, so the sports hall’s vast space would have to be heated from above.
After assessment, it was decided that there was clearly sufficient height in the hall to accommodate ceiling heating without placing it at risk of damage from wayward tennis balls or basketballs. Ceiling-mounted radiant heating panels are ideally suited to rooms with high ceilings.
In many applications, the panels are incorporated so unobtrusively within the fabric of the building that occupiers are unaware that they are even there. Equally, however, radiant panels can also be free-hanging, designed to make a great style statement and a feature
of the space.
The solution needed to be both efficient and lightweight in order to minimise time and cost, be keenly priced to stay within the school’s budget.
The Product: ZIP Radiant Panels:
Zehnder’s ZIP radiant ceiling panels are 320 mm wide and available in standard lengths of 2,3,4,5, and 6 metres. Longer strips can be created by connecting multiple individual elements in a row.
Rather than heating the entire air volume of a room, needlessly
wasting energy by warming-up outer walls and ceilings, radiant heating warms only the solid objects in its ‘line of sight’, such as people, objects and furniture.