First Underfloor heating install advice and tips

[king of pipes]

I could do it in 2 days but allow 4 as it's you first one £1000 to lay it and connection to the system isn't far out I'd say .

 

[RayPlumb]

Would 150m x 16mm pipe have much of an impact on the expansion vessel, as this water will not be as hot as the rad water. Is there a online calculator or should I just see if expansion vessel copes?

 

[ShaunCorbs]

Your adding roughly 16litres extra so maybe 2-3l extra of expansion max

 

[Ric2013]

I used Uheat 5 years ago. Wanted to try out UFH in my own house which doubles as my guinea-pig for.. everything. They sold me a spreader plate system (which was what I wanted). Jake was helpful, but miscalculated the number of spreader plates I'd need (he didn't take into account the MIs that required an unheated perimeter so now I have a box of them I don't know what to do with). The room thermostat in the kit had Chinglish instructions and uses a bewildering variety of irrelevant and counter-intutive symbols. Uheat gave me contradictory advice on it as he didn't understand it either and, while it is CE marked, Jake didn't understand what I was on about when I asked for the Declaration of Conformity (I called it a Certificate of Conformity, so probably my fault). On the other hand, the kit is still working 5 years later (although I think the heat output underperforms slightly as the spreader plate design did not make good contact with the pipe itself, something I modified for the better in one zone but not the other).

I have seen far more detailed design and installer guidance on a kit a customer had had installed (by another firm that then installed it wrongly and ignored the instructions) who even specified the exact pipe layout and gave the exact lengths of pipe required and was impressed. But I expect the far more detailed firm came at a far higher cost: the Uheat kit was very well priced.

General tips: Putting the pipe in in general is really much easier with an assistant. Hours not days, but you need planning time as you need to know where the pipe is going to end up before you start putting it in and getting it wrong. If the manufacturer does not design the exact pipe runs for you, you can have the fun of deciding what kind of layout you will use. And if it's your first time, a tip from me is to have two hoses to commission: I didn't, had to rely on turning off the water as soon as it started to gush from the opposite manifold so there was still air in the system, and wasted much time using the manifold pump to clear airlocks, which is not the best way!

Stuff nobody told me at the time included to fit biocide to the heating system due to the low temperatures. At the time, look at what Heat Geek has to say about UFH and particularly about CCTs (with lockshield valves) near the manifold was not an option as he hadn't made the videos back then, but I would recommend it now.