MCS requirements for whole home UFH

[Nick Laslett]

11 hours ago, Gus Potter said:

The reason I often challenge is that folk are desinging the pipes in the floor with no redundancy, or recognising that what gets built on site may not actually be what is shown on loop cad for example.

I’ve mentioned this before, but my ground floor UFH was installed with every pipe run being about 10m shorter than the loopCAD design, essentially missing at least one loop in each room. 
 

Unfortunately, even though I diligently took many photos of the install, I didn’t actually notice the shorter runs until many years after the foundation had been poured. 
 

One room is particularly bad. Don’t know what the installer was thinking. If you compare the picture to the design it makes no sense. Wrong loop pattern too. I was still very green at this stage of the build. 
 

 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 08:27 by Nick Laslett

[saveasteading]

57 minutes ago, Nick Laslett said:

I was still very green at this stage of the

Such a good example of incompetence.

I get your point.

As a newbie you don't contemplate for a moment that supposed experts can be so incompetent.

Can't read a drawing. Don't understand what they are doing or why it matters.

Don't know how little they know.

 

You don't dare question them or you get abuse, condescension or simply ignored.

And now you deal with it how?

 

[saveasteading]

Just after the above, I read this about tacit knowledge. Very relevant.

 

What is tacit knowledge

It's sponsored (ad at the end) but interesting.

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/tacit-knowledge-further-education-teaching-careers-skills-learning-b2825537.html

[SimonD]

On 04/11/2025 at 20:38, cmdrawesome said:

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?

 

Take it from someone working in the industry that if anyone, and I mean anyone, including a person from MCS, say MCS says this, ask them specifically where it says that in the library of standards they've got. 99.9% of the time they'll go silent a crawl back to their hole.

 

For example, in the last month I've had an MCS umbrella dictate installation requirements that MCS publish. I lifted exactly what MCS says - in fact - to tell the umbrella they're wrong. the umbrella immediately changed their mind. I've also just had to submit a complaint to a competent person scheme because they refused to certify an installation of mine because of what 'MCS requires.' I then quoted exactly what MCS requires and it's the opposite of what the competent persons scheme assessment people told me. Funnily enough they've gone completely quiet since my complaint.

 

Unfortunately there are a lot of people in this industry who haven't got a clue what they're talking about ☹️

Edited yesterday at 10:30 by SimonD

[Bornagain]

On 04/11/2025 at 20:38, cmdrawesome said:

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.

 

 

We live in our self build that we did in 2011, the house is ICF with all the normal bells and whistles. It has UFH downstairs with no heating upstairs, the UFH being powered by E7 electricity.

 

This summer we have taken advantage of the BUS and have had an ASHP fitted which heats the existing UFH and thermal store which then provides DHW.

 

We had three firms in to provide quotes and all of them were happy that we would be eligible for the BUS grant without adding any heating upstairs, the work has been carried out and the grant has been paid to the firm.

 

The slab that our UFH heats is a combination of 100mm of concrete and around 170mm of screed, this all sit on top of 300mm of EPS - we have a very low heat curve and the heating is working with a COP in excess of 5, there is almost no cycling.