MCS requirements for whole home UFH

[cmdrawesome]

Ok, so in my 4 bed, 2-storey self build I'm having wet UFH installed at the bottom of the concrete slab, which sits on top of an isoquick passive slab. Walls are passive spec, roof is almost passive spec, ICF construction so airtightness will hopefully be <1. UFH and DHW all powered by an ASHP. Yay for acronyms!

 

I was planning to put aircon in the upstairs bedrooms, electric UFH / towel rads in the upstairs bathrooms, and leave it at that.

MCS are saying that in order to qualify for the £7500 grant the UFH needs to be in every room. Is this really the case? the aircon will be able to provide a small amount of top-up heating if required.

 

 

[JohnMo]

1 minute ago, cmdrawesome said:

UFH needs to be in every room

No. The house needs to be heated by the a heat pump, you can have radiators or UFH or fan coils. You can also over specify the ground floor heating as long as you/installer can demonstrate it provides enough heat to also heat the upper storey. This is a bit installer specific.  No sure the grant allow you take any credit for A2A just A2W heat pumps.

 

I would have UFH in bedrooms. 

 

Why not, UFH downstairs, fan coils upstairs (over size slightly). Then dump the Aircon altogether. Then run heat pump in cooling mode in the summer to UFH and fan coils. In winter run all in heat mode. Cool energy do some nice looking fan coils even ones for the bathroom.

[Gus Potter]

Ah philistine here.

 

Why on gods earth are we designing systems that are not passive in the UK to cool houses?

 

Why not design our doors / ground floor windows to provide purge ventilation and say put Velux windows in the roof to promote passive stack type convection with a bit of cross flow ventilation. You can achieve this even on a single story building. 

 

Again I'll come back to this. I've been designing UFH as a designer and as an SE for decades. So I kind of know what the long term costs are. And no one on BH has stepped up to this plate.. yet.. I'm alone in my view it seems.

 

But the thing is.. I'm pretty good at maths, have installed and designed UFH when most of you were in short pants, I know the economics! and to boot I'm an SE so know how you integrate UFH structurally. 

 

So get that up you and lets see some evidence about long term maintenance costs on UFH and the introduction of complex controls.. Oh and if you can make that basic argument then have a go at cooling.

 

If you want to make your arguement then explain how pipes in the floors work over the design life of the house first. Work up from there. Go  on and give it a go! I'm willing to learn. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited 44 minutes ago by Gus Potter