hey, thinking of having the velta under floor heating system in my new house i am renovating. they are timber joists on the two upper floors and solid floors on ground floor.
i am happy it will work well on the ground floor as a friend of mine has it under stone flags, which is my intention.
My concern is under the wood floors on the upper areas, as wood is not a great heat conductor. Plus through carpets.
Has anyone got any experience.
thanks ak
Youd better be insulating the ground floor as part of the refurb.
Ive seen some suspended wooden floor systems which seem OK, but inevitably dont have the useful thermal mass of a solid base to work with.
A recent thread on here, including a bit about my new UFH:
http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/underfloor-heating
We've got it in oour house, upstairs is wooden joists, chipboard flooring and carpet. Works fine.
Ours is a water based not electric system. The pipes upstairs lie in aluminium sheets that fit between the joists and are up cloe to the flooring. The sheets each have a small channel to hold the pipe central/equidistant from the joists. Then it is heavily insulated underneath with silver paper on bubblewrap type stuff and about 180mm of glass wool.
nainosliw.
are the running costs, ie electric bills high.? more than a conventional central heating system with radiators ?
Im not sure of the relative efficiency between an electric and a wet system, but electricity costs about 10-15p /KWh whereas gas is somewhere around 4-8p/KWh.
UFH wet works great with solar and a buffer tank for best running costs.
You don't want carpet... 🙂
I don't think it is particularly more expensive. We have a big 5 bedroom house heated with oil and oil for the heating and hot water comes to about £50 a month. The house is modern and well insulated though, and we also have a solid fuel stove.
The advantages we see is mostly that the rooms don't have radiators so you can put stuff anywhere you like.
Only thing I'd say is that it is slower to respond, both getting hot and cooling down. We used to have radiators in another house and the place would start to warm up within about 15-20 minutes, with the underfloor it's about twice as long.
We have zone thermostats and programmers, and just programme it to take account of this lag in heating and cooling, b ut if you have a chaotic lifestyle and come and go at all times of the day and night you might not like the lag.
@deadly
The carpet isn't too much of a problem tbh - a lot of the warming is through radiation, not convection. The downstairs has flagstones or wood and it works fine in each area.
Carpet not an issue, providing the TOG value is low enough. Far cheaper to run than radiators.
As I've said before on here, tried other makes but always use David Robbens as the design work is very good, and they give excellent back up.
i have a wet system - as above it is slow to respond but we have it set to a fairly similar temp all the time with room thermometers. this seems to use less fuel as it only has to work a little bit at a time. it's ace in winter when you have nice warm feet 🙂