Underfloor heating — the systems
Warm water across the whole floor — invisible, gentle and even, at just 35 °C flow. Four ways to build it, chosen by what your floors are made of and how much height you can give up. The one your rooms get comes from the survey, not a catalogue.
Method
The classic method — pipework cast into the screed so the whole slab becomes one big, gentle radiator.
New builds, extensions and renovations where the floor is coming up anyway — the cheapest per square metre and the best partner for a heat pump running low and long.
Method
Retrofit without excavation — pre-routed boards laid straight on top of the existing floor.
Occupied homes where floors are staying put. Doors are usually trimmed rather than floors dug — a whole ground floor is typically converted in days.
Method
Zero added height — aluminium spreader plates carry the pipe between the joists of a suspended timber floor.
Period properties and any home with suspended timber floors — fitted from below or with boards lifted, keeping original floor levels and thresholds untouched.
Method
The single-room solution — a thin heating mat bedded into tile adhesive, no pipework at all.
Bathrooms, en-suites and small kitchens — inexpensive to fit during retiling. Costs more per unit of heat than a wet system, so we specify it for rooms, not whole houses.
Outputs are typical design values and depend on floor covering, insulation and room heat loss — tile and stone give the most, thick carpet the least. The right method falls out of the survey: what your floors are made of, how much height you can give up, and what's heating the water.
Because the whole floor is the emitter, water at just 35 °C heats the room — the lowest flow temperature of any heating system, and the reason a heat pump feeding underfloor reaches its best efficiency, around SCOP 4.2. Nothing on the walls, nothing to see: just even warmth from below.
So we survey the floors first — construction, coverings, height headroom — then design the pipe layout and manifold zoning room by room. Every loop is pressure-tested and balanced before the floor goes down, because after that, there are no second chances.
Book the free surveyOften, yes — low-profile overlay systems add only around 20 mm on top of the existing floor, and between-joist systems add nothing at all. The survey tells you what your rooms can take.
Engineered wood, yes. Carpet works within limits — underlay and carpet together need to stay reasonably thin or they blanket the heat. Tile and stone perform best of all.
Screeded systems are steady rather than instant — designed to hold rooms at temperature efficiently instead of blasting on and off. Overlay and electric systems respond in minutes, and the controls handle the schedules either way.
No — it runs from a boiler too. But its 35 °C flow temperature is exactly where heat pumps excel, so the pairing is where the running-cost savings live.
