By the Comcare Heating Solutions engineering team. Commercial and industrial mechanical contractors, Liverpool and the North West.
TL;DR: the short answer
An industrial heating system is the combination of heat source, distribution and controls used to keep a factory, production plant or industrial unit at a safe working temperature, typically 16 degrees Celsius for general work and 13 degrees for heavy manual work under the Workplace Regulations Approved Code of Practice. In UK factories the four systems that actually get specified are radiant tube heaters, gas fired warm air units, wet systems fed by condensing boilers or heat pumps, and destratification retrofits that fix an existing system rather than replace it. For tall, draughty, part occupied production space, radiant is usually the cheapest to run. For process buildings that need tight air temperature control, filtration or year round ventilation, a wet system or air handling plant wins. The single biggest saving in most UK factories is not new plant at all, it is zoning and controls on the plant you already have.
If you want a heat loss calculation and a costed options paper for your site, talk to our commercial gas and heating team in Liverpool.
What counts as an industrial heating system?
The phrase gets used loosely, so it is worth being precise. An industrial heating system has three layers:
- Heat generation. Gas fired condensing boilers, direct or indirect gas fired air heaters, radiant tube or plaque heaters, air source or high temperature heat pumps, biomass, or waste heat recovery from process plant.
- Distribution. Wet pipework to radiators, fan coils or underfloor circuits. Ducted warm air. Or no distribution at all, which is the point of radiant.
- Control. Zone thermostats, time clocks, black bulb sensors for radiant, weather compensation, and increasingly a building management system tying the lot together.
Commercial heating and industrial heating overlap, but they are not the same brief. An office needs comfort at 21 degrees in a well sealed envelope. A factory needs a safe minimum temperature in a building with 10 metre eaves, roller shutter doors opening forty times a shift, and equipment that is itself throwing off heat. Design that ignores the difference is where money gets wasted.
What is the best heating system for a factory?
There is no single answer, but there is a reliable decision rule: match the system to how the space is used, not to the floor area.
Ask three questions.
- How tall is it? Above roughly 4 metres to the eaves, warm air stratifies. Roof level temperatures 10 to 15 degrees warmer than floor level are common in tall industrial buildings, and every degree of that is heat you paid for and nobody stood in.
- How leaky is it? Frequent door openings dump heated air. Radiant heat warms the floor slab, racking and people directly, so the building recovers far faster after a door opens than a warm air system does.
- Is occupancy continuous or patchy? If half the building is a low occupancy storage bay and the other half is a manned production line, whole building heating is the wrong model. Spot heating and zoning are the right one.
Comparison: industrial heating options for UK factories
| System | Best suited to | Typical strengths | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Radiant tube heaters | High bay production, workshops, part occupied space, buildings with frequent door openings | Heats people and surfaces not air volume, fast recovery after door openings, strong zoning, published case data shows large reductions against forced air in tall buildings | Needs correct mounting height and angle, black bulb control not air thermostats, poor fit for low ceilings and dusty or hazardous atmospheres |
| Gas fired warm air heaters | Buildings needing rapid whole space warm up, moderate eaves height, some ventilation benefit | Low capital cost, quick to install, can be combined with fresh air supply | Stratification in tall buildings, heat lost through doors, needs destratification fans to perform |
| Wet system, condensing boiler | Process areas, mixed use industrial buildings with offices, sites already holding a plant room | Precise control, integrates with hot water and future heat pumps, mature and serviceable | Only condenses at low return temperatures, oversized boilers cycle and waste gas, needs a properly designed plant room |
| Air source or high temperature heat pump | Sites electrifying heat, buildings with good fabric, low temperature emitters or process hot water | No on site combustion, high seasonal efficiency, current commercial units publish flow temperatures up to around 80 degrees Celsius | Electricity to gas price ratio drives payback, needs emitter and pipework review, three phase supply and space checks |
| Destratification retrofit | Any tall building already running warm air | Cheapest intervention per kilowatt saved, no change to heat source, quick payback | Fixes distribution not generation, will not rescue genuinely undersized or failing plant |
Blended systems are common and usually right. A typical Merseyside manufacturing site ends up with radiant over the production floor, a small wet circuit off the existing boilers for the offices and welfare block, and destratification fans over the storage bay.
How do you size an industrial heating system correctly?
This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the one that decides whether the system is cheap or expensive to run for the next twenty years.
Proper sizing means a design heat load calculation to BS EN 12831-1, using UK external design conditions from CIBSE Guide A rather than a rule of thumb watts per square metre figure. For an industrial building the calculation has to include:
- Fabric losses through walls, roof and floor slab, using real U values not assumed ones
- Air infiltration, which in a factory with vehicle doors is often the largest single term
- Ventilation required for the process, including any local extract that pulls heated air out of the building
- Internal gains from machinery, lighting and people, which in a busy production hall can be substantial and are routinely ignored
- Intermittency, because a building heated from cold every Monday needs a different preheat capacity to one running continuously
Oversizing is the default failure mode. An oversized boiler short cycles, never reaches condensing return temperatures and burns more gas than a correctly sized one. Oversized radiant overshoots and gets switched off manually, which destroys the control strategy. If your quote does not reference a heat loss calculation, it is a guess. Our commercial heating system design guide covers the full method.
What are the UK regulations for heating an industrial building?
Four sit on top of most factory heating projects.
Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992. The Approved Code of Practice sets a normal minimum of 16 degrees Celsius, dropping to 13 degrees where the work involves severe physical effort. These are ACOP guidance figures describing what “reasonable” usually means, not a hard statutory number, and HSE has been reviewing the code. They are still the benchmark an inspector will use.
Building Regulations Part L. Approved Document L Volume 2, covering buildings other than dwellings, applies to new industrial buildings and to controlled fittings in existing ones. The 2026 edition was published in March 2026, with the Future Buildings Standard following for non higher risk buildings in March 2027. If a project is being scoped now for installation in 2027, design to the incoming standard, not the outgoing one.
Gas safety and ventilation standards. BS 6644 governs gas fired plant from 70kW to 1.8MW, and IGEM/UP/10 covers ventilation for flued appliances. Direct fired air heaters have their own air change requirements. Get this wrong and the installation is not commissionable.
Energy compliance. ESOS Phase 4 qualification is assessed on status at 31 December 2026, with a compliance deadline of 5 December 2027, and it captures organisations with 250 or more employees or turnover above 44 million pounds. Heating almost always shows up in the audit as a cost effective opportunity, so it is worth being ahead of it. Ignoring compliance has real consequences, which we covered in our piece on the legal consequences of ignoring commercial heating compliance.
Should a UK factory switch from gas to a heat pump?
Sometimes, and the honest answer in 2026 is that it depends on three numbers: your flow temperature, your electricity to gas price ratio, and your building fabric.
Commercial high temperature units now publish flow temperatures around 75 to 80 degrees Celsius, which means retrofitting onto existing radiator circuits is technically possible in a way it was not five years ago. Efficiency still falls as flow temperature rises, so the projects that work are the ones that reduce flow temperature first by upsizing emitters or improving fabric.
The funding picture matters and it has changed. The Industrial Energy Transformation Fund closed to new competitions in July 2025, so it is no longer a route for new projects despite still appearing in a lot of out of date supplier content. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme caps at 45kWth, which excludes most industrial plant. The two live levers for industrial sites are the Climate Change Agreement scheme, whose new phase started its first target period on 1 January 2026 and runs to 2033 with Climate Change Levy relief for eligible energy intensive processes, and the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, which from April 2027 is set to cut electricity costs for eligible manufacturers by up to 40 pounds per megawatt hour by exempting them from certain policy levies. That second one materially improves heat pump payback for qualifying sites, so it is worth checking eligibility before committing to a like for like gas replacement.
For the mechanics of how the technology works, see how commercial heat pumps work in the UK.
What is the cheapest way to cut factory heating costs without replacing the system?
If capital is tight, work down this list in order.
- Fix the controls. Zone the building so unoccupied areas are not heated to production temperatures. Add time control that matches actual shift patterns rather than a clock set in 2014. Our commercial heating controls and BMS guide covers what is worth specifying.
- Destratify. In a tall building running warm air, fans that push ceiling level heat back down are the fastest payback available. Published warehouse studies have recorded gas savings in the region of a quarter from destratification alone.
- Seal the envelope. Fast acting doors, air curtains on vehicle entrances, and dock shelters. Infiltration is usually the biggest line in an industrial heat loss calculation.
- Lower the flow temperature. Weather compensation on a wet system gets the boiler condensing for far more of the year. This is a commissioning change, not a capital project.
- Service the plant properly. Fouled heat exchangers, failed valves and drifting sensors quietly add double digit percentages to a gas bill. A planned maintenance regime pays for itself, as we set out in our commercial heating systems servicing guide.
Only after those five should you be pricing new generation plant. Half the “we need a new boiler” enquiries we attend in Liverpool and the North West turn out to be control and commissioning problems.
Industrial heating in Liverpool and the North West
Comcare Heating Solutions works across Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire and Greater Manchester on industrial and commercial mechanical projects, from single unit radiant installs to full plant room replacements in live production environments. Because we are a mechanical contractor rather than a product supplier, we specify the system the building needs rather than the one we happen to stock, and we handle the pipework, gas, ventilation and drainage that sit around it.
Ready to get a proper answer for your site?
Book a site survey and we will produce a heat loss calculation, a costed comparison of the viable options, and a projected running cost for each. Get in touch with Comcare Heating Solutions or read more about our industrial and commercial gas and heating services and plant room upgrades in Liverpool.
Frequently asked questions
What temperature does a factory legally have to be in the UK?
The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 Approved Code of Practice sets a normal minimum of 16 degrees Celsius, or 13 degrees Celsius where the work involves severe physical effort. These are guidance figures rather than absolute statutory limits, but the underlying legal duty to maintain a reasonable temperature is binding on employers.
What is the most efficient heating system for an industrial building?
For tall, intermittently occupied or draughty industrial buildings, radiant tube heating is normally the most efficient because it heats surfaces and people directly instead of the whole air volume. For process areas needing tight temperature or air quality control, a well controlled wet system or a heat pump with low temperature emitters is more efficient. The right answer depends on eaves height, occupancy pattern and infiltration rate, which is why a heat loss calculation comes before system selection.
How much does an industrial heating system cost in the UK?
Cost varies far too widely for a single figure to be useful, because it is driven by heat load, building height, distribution route and whether an existing plant room is being reused. What is consistent is the ratio: for most industrial buildings, lifetime running cost dwarfs installed cost, so a system chosen on capital price alone is usually the expensive option. Ask any contractor for a projected annual running cost alongside the quote.
Can you heat a factory with a heat pump?
Yes. Current commercial and industrial units publish flow temperatures up to around 80 degrees Celsius, which makes retrofit onto existing wet circuits viable. The projects that succeed reduce flow temperature first, check the electrical supply capacity, and model running cost against the site’s actual electricity and gas tariffs rather than headline efficiency figures.
Is radiant heating better than warm air for a warehouse or factory?
In buildings above roughly 4 metres to the eaves, and in any building with frequent vehicle door openings, radiant generally outperforms warm air because it does not rely on heating a large air volume that then rises and escapes. Warm air remains a reasonable choice for lower buildings, for spaces needing rapid whole area warm up, or where ventilation air is needed anyway. See our guide to commercial heating for warehouses for the storage and distribution equivalent.
How often should industrial heating plant be serviced?
At minimum annually for gas fired plant, in line with the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 duty to maintain appliances in a safe condition, and more often for hard worked plant on continuous duty. Most industrial sites run a planned preventative maintenance schedule based on SFG20 rather than a single annual visit.
