underfloor heating and carpets yes or no

[sawdust1]

Been asking around re underfloor heating with carpets and getting conflicting answers.
Got it under slate floor and very pleased with the results.
Going to take up the floors in living rooms and put in some insulation so have the chance
to instal it or go for radiators.
Anyone have it under carpets and did it work ok ?

 

[Beau]

Carpet is an insulator so never going to be as good as tiled or slate covering. On the other hand if you have very good insulation under the UFH the heat will inevitably come out into the room. We have UFH and mainly tiled floors but have carpet in one room. It warms up enough but cant really compare as that room has a very large glazing ratio so heats up and cooed down very differently to the rest of the house. If you cant put in good levels of insulation I would stick with rads as you will just end up heating the ground under your house.

 

[Peter Sefton]

We have had underfloor heating in our past three houses and we love it.

The barn we now live in has underfloor heating in all the ground floor rooms, with a mixture of slate, carpet and Oak solid flooring. We undertook the renovation and the new floor structure was designed with water underfloor heating in mind. Both the Oak and carpet will act as insolation but the system was calculated to work in this situation. The carpets and underlay are both low tog and suitable for use with underfloor and the wide Oak boards were well dried and acclimatised prior to laying down with Sika Bond.

The slate is more responsive than the other floor coverings but the house is always very comfortable and great to live in. We have rads upstairs in the rooms with timber floor structures, we had underfloor heating fitted upstairs in our first barn conversion and I wouldn't recommend it, rads work much better in this situation in my opinion.

Cheers Peter

 

[Beau]

Thing is Peter no two houses are the same. We have wooden floors upstairs with UFH but they are plenty warm enough because the whole house is insulated to a high standard so you get little variation between rooms. With lower levels of insulation problems from room to room will show their heads more. No one hat fits all solution IMO

 

[RogerS]

Currently renting a place with UFH and we hate it. Maybe it's a lousy system...four rooms downstairs each with its' own UFH and controller but two of the rooms don't have a door between them so go figure. Plus to get any heat upstairs in the bathroom at least one of the zones downstairs must be demanding heat. It's a mixture of tiles and wooden floor. One room with tiles has a carpet.

Tiles feel warm. The one where the carpet is, the tiles are warm but the carpet is not. The two rooms with wooden floors are useless for heating. Start it up and wait. And wait. And still waiting. Oh...here it comes...a day later and look it's sunny outside, I don't want any heat thank you but the heat stored in the floor keeps on giving.

I'd never put in UFH based on this place.

 

[Beau]

The two rooms with wooden floors are useless for heating. Start it up and wait. And wait. And still waiting. Oh...here it comes...a day later and look it's sunny outside, I don't want any heat thank you but the heat stored in the floor keeps on giving.

I'd never put in UFH based on this place.

Yes if you want responsive don't go for wet UFH. In our place it's open plan and house is kept at a steady temperature through UFH and powered by a ground source heat pump. No idea what the electric UFH is like.

 

[jimmy_s]

I used to design a lot of commercial and domestic UFH systems on behalf of some manufacturers. Generally UFH works ok with carperts but best to try and keep the tog of the carpet and underlay as low as possible. Generally we would try to design to a tog of 1.5 for carpets. It also depends on the insulation as if the heat losses are too high you can have problems - at best you normally get about 90watts per sqm from UFH without adding perimeter zones operating at higher surface temperatures.
Screeded is generally better than plate type systems. Also try to get a decent amount of insulation under the floor as the losses through the floor are much higher with UFH as the mean temp of the slab is much higher than is the case for conventional heating.