Under Floor Heating (wet)

Under floor heating is a great and efficient form of heating a room or property. There are a couple of ways of achieving this but the best type if you are fitting out a large area, or want to convert your entire home, is a system called a ‘wet’ under floor heating system. With this, you will need to extend the central heating. An Ilford Plumber is familiar with UFCH.

This causes you to think about:

a). The best way to put the pipework in place.
b). A way to control the system temperature.

Lets take (b) first, the best way to have a rock steady temperature is by using a valve called a blending valve. The boiler will continue to create water at about 80 degrees C but is kept from the under floor heating system. The blender valve monitors the water temperature in the UFCH (under floor central heating system), adding a small amount of water as required to keep the temperature at 35-40 degrees C. A smaller UFCH system, can achieve the same by using a thermostatic blending valve. A larger system has a thing called a manifold. It is a combination of circulating pump, blending valve and series of valves to manage the system flow, and isolate the heating in certain rooms. Even larger systems exist, and in these, the efficiency is reduced as the boiler is switched on and off every 2 or so minutes to top up the UFCH. A ‘buffer tank could be added which is a thermal store, essentially a large body of water kept at the correct UFCH temperature which would fit between the boiler and manifold. This arrangement lets the boiler heat the thermal store, providing the heat for the manifold. Ilford Plumbers fit manifolds. This store loses heat slowly, so keeps heating the manifold for long periods without help from the boiler (energy saving). This suits systems that use an air source heat pump, which allows the heat pump to run during the day when it is cost effective to heat the ‘buffer tank’, then use this hot water to supply the UFCH in the evening at when the pump is less efficient.