Uncovering the Hidden Potential of Underfloor Heating

What springs to mind when you think of underfloor heating? Shiny plush flooring? Ultra-modern show houses? Grand Designs-style mansions?

Well as it turns out, it’s perfectly suited to any kind of home, and although it’s mostly known as luxury feature, UFH might have a surprisingly crucial role to play in a sustainable heating future.

For anyone not familiar with underfloor heating, it’s really just what it says on the tin: a system by which buildings are heated from beneath the flooring and without the need for on-wall radiators. It’s a very simple concept and actually has its origins in the days of the Ancient Romans, who would circulate hot air from fires in basement areas through cavities in the walls.

In modern times though it's a much more subtle, compact system powered by small electric elements or more commonly, circuits of hydronic piping fitted as a thin layer directly underneath a room’s flooring. By circulating hot water through a series of continuous loops, they create a large radiant surface that warms the room from the floor upwards. However, despite its subtle simplicity, UFH has struggled to really catch on in modern homes.

And it’s partly understandable. It can be a costly, inconvenient job to retrofit UFH on older homes - unlike radiators which are easily attached and unattached from walls. It usually involves the current flooring material being taken up and sometimes the floor heights themselves being raised.

Even with this considered, there are stacks of benefits to having UFH installed in the home.

When compared with conventional radiators UFH offers a much more comfortable warmth for the occupants. With heat being supplied by one uniform layer (in many cases removing the need for exposed radiator units) it provides the room with a gentle and well-distributed warmth. Furthermore, the heat is radiated rather than transferred by air currents, giving living spaces a more naturally warm feeling and eliminating any exposed intense source of heat. This can also be an especially useful safety feature for households with children or vulnerable adults.

There’s also huge eco-potential here. In almost all cases UFH is a lot more energy efficient than conventional boiler/radiator systems, and therefore cheaper to run. This is because they run at a much lower flow temperature than radiators, hence why the warmth is slower and gentler. This is a huge draw for anyone interested in reducing both their bills and their carbon emissions. As a heating installer, getting involved in UFH installation would be a great way to boost your repertoire for providing homeowners with a fully integrated eco-home.

This lower flow temperature also makes them perfect for use alongside air or ground source heat pumps, which as we know provide the most sustainable and low-carbon home heating. For both retrofit and newbuild projects it is therefore often convenient to install heat pumps and underfloor hand-in-hand. UFH often eliminates the need for the house to be fitted with a new integrated piping system to accommodate the heat pump so the two will complement each other and contribute to a fully eco-home.

With the growing necessity for sustainability in home heating, its durability, cost efficiency and low-carbon potential make it an ideal component for new build developments. And while the challenges for the wider retrofit market will remain, for those with the willingness and the resources to invest in home developments, UFH provides a more discrete, comfortable and eco-friendly way to heat the home.

If you’re interested in UFH and how it can be incorporated with heat pump installations, you should check out the new Ambiente integration into Heatpunk. By allowing the design and specification of UFH and heat pumps simultaneously, users are now able to design a full sustainable home heating system all in one place.

Using the seamless heat loss calculations of Heatpunk makes specifying an accurate UFH system easier than ever before.

Check out Ambiente’s amazing UFH range and sign up to Heatpunk for free today!

Ambiente are experienced UFH specialists and one of the current market leaders in their design and manufacture. By allowing the design and specification of UFH and heat pumps simultaneously, users are now able to design a full sustainable home heating system all in one place.

This is vital if choosing to use UFH with a heat pump as any parameters specified by the heat pump manufacturer will need to be incorporated into the UFH at the design stage. It will have to be checked whether the heat pump being used will have sufficient pumping capacity to circulate the water around the entire UFH system or if an additional manifold pump will be necessary.

The most accurate way to do this is to work back from the specific heat loss figures of the building and rooms in question. This will depend on the fabric heat loss of the building to be heated, flow temperature provided by the heat source and the proposed floor coverings in each area, all of which is included in a Heatpunk design. Failing to consider these things from the outset is one of the main pitfalls for any potential underfloor system, so designing with Heatpunk is a great way to avoid costly and inconvenient alterations further down the line to rectify any mistakes.