UFH - Ideal Design

[andy]

Hi all

 

I've had a quote for my UFH and am concerned about the choice of brands that have been specified (Capricorn manifolds, Tweetop PERT E pipe, etc...).

 

My heating requirements are as follows:

• Not quite passive house level (due to elongated shape mainly)
• ASHP - 7-8kW - including cooling, looking at Samsung
• Wet UFH - circa 1000m, 2 manifolds (due to split slab) and 2 pumps
• One room upstairs above lounge (office) - low temp radiator?
• Bathroom and en suite - wet and comfort electric UFH
• All controlled via Loxone - Touch switches for thermostats/possibly timed for electric UFH too

 

So, given the above, what would your "wish-list" be for the best options for the following:

• Wet UFH
  • Manifolds?
  • Mixing valves?
  • Actuators?
  • Pipe?
  • Pumps?
  • Anything else?
• ASHP?
• Electric UFH?

 

Anything I've missed?

 

I would love to do the UFH pipes onto slab myself but I've never tackled this before (done plenty of 2nd fix plumbing) so I'm nervous of screwing something fairly fundamental up

 

Thanks all!

 

Andy

[epsilonGreedy]

8 hours ago, andy said:

Wet UFH - circa 1000m, 2 manifolds (due to split slab) and 2 pumps

 

 

Think you mean 100 m2?

[ProDave]

17 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

Think you mean 100 m2?

I read that as 1000 metres of pipe spread between 2 manifolds.

[PeterW]

8 hours ago, andy said:

Capricorn manifolds,

 

Never heard of them..!!

 

ivar or wunda are the two we fight over on here - pipe is pretty much pipe 

[ProDave]

Wilo pumps are my favourite now, very quiet, even quieter than my previous favourite Grundfoss.

[andy]

12 hours ago, ProDave said:

I read that as 1000 metres of pipe spread between 2 manifolds.

Yes, that's correct - 1000m of pipe and 2 manifolds.

[andy]

13 hours ago, PeterW said:

 

Never heard of them..!!

 

ivar or wunda are the two we fight over on here - pipe is pretty much pipe 

 

Ivar stainless manifold with Ivar thermostatic mixing valve pump set sounds like a good option to me along with good Wilo or Grundfoss pump.

 

With two manifolds, do I need two pumps?  Second manifold is 1m higher due to sloping site but still "ground floor".

 

Am I right in thinking that in a well insulated house, I want to control the flow to a room to ensure it's getting the correct heating input but due to slow response time, the whole house is treated as a single zone?  If that's the case, do I need actuators?

 

Also, not sure what the Heatmiser wiring centres are actually controlling...

[ProDave]

An UFH manifold controller / wiring centre usually takes a number of thermostat inputs.  When one (or more) thermostats opens, it turns on the manifold pump, opens the actuators for that zone, and calls for heat from the heating system.

 

You can buy expensive ones that may have a few extra unique features, or you can but them as cheap as chips from ebay (they are the ones I have)

 

I have my house zoned into 3 zones but as others have pointed out, you won't get much temperature difference between them.  Perhaps the best reason for having zones might be if one room gets a lot of sun and another room faces north and never gets any sun, then on a bright winter day the sunny room may overheat, which would be less likely to happen if it's UFH was off.

[Temp]

We quite like having the master bathroom on its own zone. That way we can have it toasty first thing without heating the bedrooms to the same extent. We're using a Heatmiser stat with remote sensor for the bathroom.

 

We have several computers in one bedroom and that would probably get too hot if it was on same zone/stat as other bedrooms.