Size of Plant & Utility room

[Norbert]

How big does a plant room need to be to comfortably contain a full suite of technology e.g. HW and buffer cylinder, MVHR, UFH manifold, battery, elec distribution etc...

Attached are 2 layouts, one with a L extension, and one without. The L section takes room from a pantry/larder, which I would like to be bigger. So would the basic 4M x 1.6M be big enough without the extension? I have dotted a few plant items around at I hope realistic sizes to try to judge.

In addition to the plant there would also be sink and washing machine. I am thinking no window necessary to make more room.

Any advice fom anyone with a fine plant room would be appreciated.

Plant & Utility-1.pdf

[ProDave]

The first thing I say is do you really really want the HW cylinder in the plant room?  Only put it there is the plant room is central to all points of hot water use to minimise HW delivery time.  If not, the HW cylinder is often better placed in an airing cupboard elsewhere in the house that is central to all points of HW use.

 

 

[Norbert]

39 minutes ago, ProDave said:

The first thing I say is do you really really want the HW cylinder in the plant room?  Only put it there is the plant room is central to all points of hot water use to minimise HW delivery time.  If not, the HW cylinder is often better placed in an airing cupboard elsewhere in the house that is central to all points of HW use.

 

 

The plant room is central, kitchen on one side, bathroom on the other. So In think we already have already minimised HW delivery times. It could indeed go in the bathroom, but that would mean extra delivery time to the kitchen.

[JohnMo]

Do you really need a buffer?

 

I think the rectangular shaped room looks fine, you may need to move some things around. Not sure how close the consumer unit is to the sink? Is it too close. I would be tempted to move all the wet stuff in one area and the electric stuff in another to keep them away from each other. MVHR will be wall mounted so most likely so could be above other stuff.

 

 

[Bonner]

The L shape doesn’t really add much useful room, makes access to the HW cylinder awkward. Better to keep the space for your pantry.

[TonyT]

Allow for a drain connection/ floor drain makes life so much easier for maintenance 

[Norbert]

1 hour ago, JohnMo said:

Do you really need a buffer?

 

I think the rectangular shaped room looks fine, you may need to move some things around. Not sure how close the consumer unit is to the sink? Is it too close. I would be tempted to move all the wet stuff in one area and the electric stuff in another to keep them away from each other. MVHR will be wall mounted so most likely so could be above other stuff.

 

 

Not sure about the buffer, I will leave that to whoever specs the ASHP and UFH. I gather it is useful to prevent short cycling of the ASHP therefore more efficient.

As to the positioning, yes zoning would be good. I was just trying to get an idea about how much total space is needed.

[Norbert]

51 minutes ago, Bonner said:

The L shape doesn’t really add much useful room, makes access to the HW cylinder awkward. Better to keep the space for your pantry.

As long as the simple shape is big enough, then that is my favoured option.

[MoraM3]

Looks like an ideal size as a plant room but not sure with combining it as a utility, especially the point raised regarding the proximity of the sink location to the electrics.

Another consideration with it also being used as a utility room could be potential limited storage/worktop, especially if in the future you ever wanted to install a tumble drier or additional battery storage.  Also, is there solar PV to consider and the associated switchgear, invertor and ancillaries? 

 

Overall, with all the services converging this would need a very carefully thought out layout/services and ducting routing plan and a neat install. 

 

Keep us updated on your final solution and how it turns out.

[joth]

The rectangular one is almost same size as ours, we only have manifold, uvc, water softener, plus utility (sink and washing mc) and cat litter tray there and to me it feels really cramped to actually use the utility space. 

Adding a battery, electric distro, and MVHR definitely pushes it past being a useful utility space IMHO 

I think you need to allow more floor space for the uvc and all the misc plumbing (2 expansion tanks, pumps, filter, etc) and also our manifold inc pump ended up needing much more space than anticipated. If you have high ceilings getting some vertical stacking of items may help a little. (Our ceilings are not so high)

 

Battery, depending on the system, can be much larger than you have shown there too

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by joth