Ufh, how many manifolds

[Russell griffiths]

Just starting to get some layouts done for the ufh

what I want to know is how many people have more than one manifold, my thoughts are if I have one manifold it’s going to be a big old thing with a lot of pipes all coming back to it, leading to a very congested floor area in front of the manifold 

 

is there a benefit of having 2 or more manifolds to spread the pipework out a bit more evenly. 

 

I have designed the house with multiple linen,storage cupboards so I have plenty of space to put up to 3 manifolds if needed. 

 

3 bedrooms all on the ground floor, plus open plan living, dining kitchen. Then an office and bootroom

 

 

[newhome]

I have 4   2 upstairs and 2 down. They do the left hand and right hand sides of the house respectively. No idea if that’s a good idea or not and the additional parts will add a bit to the cost I imagine. 

[PeterW]

Your limit is length of loop - try and balance them all to less than 100m each. Is everything ground floor ..? What’s the total heated area and what is the heat source ..?

[epsilonGreedy]

Just testing my knowledge here...

 

1 hour ago, PeterW said:

Your limit is length of loop - try and balance them all to less than 100m each.

 

 

Is this limit stated because a longer loop risks a temperature gradient across the floor slab?

Edited January 27, 2019 by epsilonGreedy

[Mr Punter]

There often seems to be a few areas where you get loads of pipes. Is there no way of opening up the spacing adjacent to these areas?

[Russell griffiths]

5 minutes ago, Mr Punter said:

There often seems to be a few areas where you get loads of pipes. Is there no way of opening up the spacing adjacent to these areas?

 

I think the drama starts when you have a manifold in a cupboard and you have multiple pipes coming in through the door way. 

[PeterW]

10 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

Just testing my knowledge here...

 

 

Is this limit stated because a longer loop risks a temperature gradient across the floor slab?

 

Bit of both. Used to be that pipe was only available in 100m reels too. 

 

Its why the Wunda self adjusting heads are so good as they adjust the flow to get a delta 7c across flow and return of each pipe loop so you can have varying lengths in the same zone 

[PeterW]

5 minutes ago, Russell griffiths said:

 

I think the drama starts when you have a manifold in a cupboard and you have multiple pipes coming in through the door way. 

 

You’d be surprised. I’ve put a 6 zone manifold in a cupboard with no issues. The problem starts though when you have doorways that need 2 zones through them as a 200mm spacing needs at least 800mm clear otherwise you do get hot spots. LoopCad helps with this and will make your life a lot easier. 

 

 

[Russell griffiths]

Before I start to look at this loopcad thing, can you point me in sort of the right direction

 

so a loop doesn’t want to be more than 100m

i can have more than 1 loop in a zone

i was planning on having 3 zones, 

1, main living,dining,kitchen

2, bedrooms

3, bootroom. 

Any pointers

[Mr Punter]

Don't bother with UFC upstairs.

[PeterW]

3 minutes ago, Russell griffiths said:

Before I start to look at this loopcad thing, can you point me in sort of the right direction

 

so a loop doesn’t want to be more than 100m

i can have more than 1 loop in a zone

i was planning on having 3 zones, 

1, main living,dining,kitchen

2, bedrooms

3, bootroom. 

Any pointers

 

Seems ok. A zone can be controlled by a single thermostat. Potentially you could have each bedroom on its own stat, other than that it’s all fine as you’ve got it. 

 

Multi loop zones are fine too. Try and go for a common spacing everywhere and don’t mix and match. Start with a design flow temp of 35c and work back from that - if you need to reduce the spacings due to overheating consider it to be a zone with its own controller or thermostat. 

 

And the stats need to have a tight hysteresis - 0.5c is good as anything else you may overshoot depending on floor finishes.  

[Russell griffiths]

What on earth does that mean. HYSTERESIS 

[Declan52]

43 minutes ago, Russell griffiths said:

 

I think the drama starts when you have a manifold in a cupboard and you have multiple pipes coming in through the door way. 

My dog loves the doorway into my utility room.  It is near solid pipe across the length of the opening.  I have 8 zones so it's a lot of pipe coming in through one opening. 

[Declan52]

3 minutes ago, Russell griffiths said:

What on earth does that mean. HYSTERESIS 

Def leopard album!! 

[PeterW]

16 minutes ago, Russell griffiths said:

What on earth does that mean. HYSTERESIS 

 

The temperature differential between a thermostat switching on and off .... so if you set it to 20c, how much either side before you get an on or off...

 

13 minutes ago, Declan52 said:

Def leopard album!! 

 

And that was Hysteria... Good album though !!

[ProDave]

I will just add my tuppence about thermostats.

 

Plain old mechanical ones are fine as long as you connect a neutral to them, they have a built in "accelerator heater" to overcome the otherwise inherent hysteresis with a mechanical thermostat.  Mine are working just fine and giving good control of room temperature.  Not to everyones taste if you want fancy digital things but don't feel you have to.

 

Don't bother heating internal corridors (other than incidental heating by pipes passing through to get to their destination) Our first build I let a "professional" designer design the UFH system.  The hall and landing loops never came on and were a waste of pipe and effort.

 

I bought all my kit from ebay.  The only caution I would say with that approach was there are a lot of manifolds on the bay that come with IBO pumps.  They are as noisy as hell.  I have already changed one to a Wilo pump and will be changing the other one shortly.

 

 

 

 

[newhome]

2 hours ago, Declan52 said:

My dog loves the doorway into my utility room

 

Mine actively avoid lying on the warm bits. One prefers the sofa anyway 

[Ed Davies]

One of Paul at the end of the road's dogs is completely freaked out by the UFH. He can't work out what the problem is.

[recoveringbuilder]

26 minutes ago, Ed Davies said:

One of Paul at the end of the road's dogs is completely freaked out by the UFH. He can't work out what the problem is.

I wonder if there’s a whistling noise coming from it that only the dog can hear, ours had that to start with, very faint but the cats could hear it!

[PeterW]

1 hour ago, Ed Davies said:

One of Paul at the end of the road's dogs is completely freaked out by the UFH. He can't work out what the problem is.

 

Probably a flow valve turned right down so it’s vibrating with the flow of water going through it - bit like a Venturi and a reed

[newhome]

1 hour ago, Ed Davies said:

One of Paul at the end of the road's dogs is completely freaked out by the UFH. He can't work out what the problem is.

 

Some sort of noise at a frequency that only the dogs can hear and humans can’t? Does the dog still freak when everything is switched off? Of course that might not help narrow it down as once dogs have been conditioned to be fearful in a situation they can remain fearful even when the negative stimulus has been removed, but that does tend to improve over time. So he can either freeze now to test the theory by having stuff switched off lol, leave the dog scared until the weather improves and the UFH is switched off anyway, or the dog might just get used to it ?

[Ed Davies]

I've left a comment on his blog pointing here. A high or low pitched noise had occurred to me (and presumably him) but not that it might be coming from a flow valve. That might well help him track it down.

[JamesP]

I have 3 manifolds. one 6,  7,  and 8 port. 2 manifolds cover about 84sqm each and the other about 120sqm.

All from Wunda,  good kit.

[Temp]

7 hours ago, Russell griffiths said:

Before I start to look at this loopcad thing, can you point me in sort of the right direction

 

so a loop doesn’t want to be more than 100m

i can have more than 1 loop in a zone

i was planning on having 3 zones, 

1, main living,dining,kitchen

2, bedrooms

3, bootroom. 

Any pointers

 

You can have multiple loops on one zone. 

 

For example our master bed and ensuite have a loop each but are currently controls by the same stat so are in the same zone. We could separate them into two zones by adding another stat. 

 

We also needed two loops for our living room, again both controlled by one stat.

 

So first work out how many loops you need. That determines how many ports you need on the manifold.

Then decide how many stats/zones you want and which loop(s) each stat will control.

 

We have two manifolds one up, one downstairs.

 

We went for programmable stats and have set up different rooms to have different temperatures at different times.

 

The UFH in the bathroom is mainly to warm the tiled floor so that comes on first thing. We used a Heatmiser stat that has a remote sensor. Stat is outside the bathroom.

Edited January 27, 2019 by Temp

[Russell griffiths]

Can anybody see any benefit in having electric ufh in the en-suite bathrooms (3) and bedrooms on wet ufh, that way if you want the main heating off in the warmer weather, but like a warm floor when you get out of the shower ?????.