Skip to content
Barbican Association

Underfloor Heating

The estate's underfloor heating system is controlled centrally by the Barbican Estate Office (BEO).

The whole estate is on or off at the same time. The temperature in your flat is a result of this heating input, the outside temperature, and the physical configuration and location of your flat.

Check the data Learn how it works
The Barbican on a sunny day

Has the heating been on?

The BEO has a building management system that records when the heating has been on. They kindly share this data with us and you can see an overview here.

Data typically updated at 8:30am each morning.

You can choose the start and end date values below, to look at whichever date range interests you.

Start Date

End Date

Show Table

How it works

The heating season is between 1st October and 31 April. There are three cycles of heat each day. The duration of heat in each of these cycles is determined by the outside temperature. The outside temperature that triggers the heating varies by time of day. For example, at 6AM the temperature only needs to be below 15C, whereas at 1:30 AM the temperature needs to be below 7C.

What do "unbiased" and "adjusted" mean?

For the heating season October 2020 to April 2021, after an estate-wide survey, it was agreed that the temperature profiles that determine when the underfloor heating is turned on be adjusted, so that we got about 20 hours of additional heat in each of April and October and about 20 hours less heat in each of January and February.

Unbiased is the number of minutes of heating which we would have got without the trial. Adjusted is the number of minutes of heating which we got during the trial. In March the heating was not affected by the trial so the numbers are the same.

The BEO continues to share both the "unbiased" and "adjusted" datasets with us, but for many months now the two numbers have been the same.

Given this, and the confusion the underfloor heating system causes in general, we have decided to stop publishing the "adjusted" data, to simplify the presentation of the chart and table above.