Design, installation and cylinders
Warm floors, and a hot water system that keeps up with the whole house.
Underfloor heating and heat pumps suit each other unusually well. Both are at their best running cooler water over longer periods rather than short hot bursts, and a floor has far more surface area to give that heat off than a radiator does. Put the two together and you get an even, steady warmth from a system that is working with the grain rather than against it. It works perfectly well on a boiler too.
The hot water half of this page gets thought about later than it should. Most people only look at the cylinder when two showers at once stops working, or when the bath takes half an hour to fill. By then the cylinder is already the wrong size. Getting it right is a design stage question: how many bathrooms, how many people, and when they all want hot water at the same time.
Each room gets its own loop and its own output figure, so a north facing room is not left trailing the rest of the house.
And if a heat pump is somewhere in your plans, we design the floor now so it does not have to be redone later.
Bathrooms, occupants and the times everyone wants hot water at once, rather than a size picked off a chart.
Underfloor is run differently to radiators, so we show you how before we hand it over.
Screeded systems laid before the floor goes down, which is where underfloor heating performs at its best.
Low profile systems that sit over the floor you already have, so the house does not have to be dug out.
Vented and unvented cylinders, sized against the demand rather than against a rule of thumb.
Tell us the rooms, the floor construction and the heat source.
We design the loops and confirm the output per room.
We fit, pressure test and commission.
We set the controls and show you how to run it.
There is no useful figure we could put on this page. Underfloor heating is priced off the floor area, the construction of the floor and what is going on top of it, and a cylinder is priced off what the household needs from it. Those are survey questions, not web page questions. We look at the floors, work out the design and put the whole thing in writing before you commit to anything.
Yes, and it is a good part of the work we do. Retrofit systems are low profile, meaning they sit over the floor you already have and add only a small amount of height rather than requiring the floor to be dug out and rescreeded. It does not have to be the whole house either: a kitchen, a bathroom or an extension on its own is a perfectly normal job.
It works under all three, but the floor finish changes how much heat gets through. Tile and stone are the best of the three, engineered wood is fine within the limits the flooring manufacturer sets, and carpet works provided the carpet and underlay together are not too thick and insulating. Tell us the finish you want at design stage and we allow for it rather than discovering it afterwards.
Longer than radiators, and we would rather say so plainly. A floor is a large mass being warmed gently, so it takes a few hours to come up to temperature and it holds that warmth for a while afterwards. That is exactly why it is run differently: you set it to hold a steady temperature rather than switching it on and off in bursts. Run that way it is comfortable and efficient. Run like a radiator system, switched on an hour before you want it, it will disappoint you.
It depends on the number of bathrooms, the number of people and, more than anything, whether hot water gets used in several places at once. A household where two showers run at the same time every morning needs a different cylinder to one where the demand is spread out, even if both are three bedroom houses. We work it out from your actual use at design stage, because a cylinder that is too small is a daily annoyance and one that is too big wastes energy keeping water hot that nobody wants.
A vented cylinder is fed from a tank in the loft and works on gravity, so the pressure at your taps and shower depends on how far below the tank they are. An unvented cylinder is fed straight from the mains, which gives you mains pressure at every tap and no tank in the loft. Unvented is what most people want, though it needs enough incoming mains pressure and flow to be worth doing, and the safety controls on it have to be checked annually. We check your incoming supply before recommending one.
We will design it properly and put the quote in writing.
