Should I have underfloor heating in my bathroom?

There are two types. Electric mats are thin, straightforward to lay under tile, and the obvious choice for a single bathroom — cheap to install, more expensive per unit of heat to run. Wet (water-fed) underfloor heating runs off your heating system, costs less to run and makes sense across a whole floor or a whole house, but it's a bigger installation and it raises the floor level more.

For one bathroom in an existing house, electric under the tiles is nearly always the sensible answer.

It's a particularly easy decision in an old Macclesfield house. A bathroom in a solid-walled Victorian terrace, or a stone cottage up on the hill, is a genuinely cold room — no cavity, no insulation in the walls, and often a north-facing back bedroom that was converted into a bathroom a lifetime after the house was built. Those rooms punish you for a cold floor in a way a well-insulated modern semi simply doesn't.

The thing to be clear about is that it's a comfort upgrade, not necessarily a whole-room heating solution — whether it alone can heat the room depends on the room, the insulation and the system. In a solid-walled house losing heat through every wall, assume it won't be enough on its own. A lot of bathrooms end up with underfloor heating for the floor and a towel rail for the towels, and that combination is popular for good reason.

Do it at refit time. The floor is already up, the tiler is already there, and the marginal cost is a fraction of what it will be when you're pulling a good floor back up in five years' time because you wish you had.