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Ufh, how many manifolds


Russell griffiths

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I fitted electric UFH in the bathroom of our old house, just to take the chill off the tiles.  IIRC it was only something like 350 W, but more than enough to warm the floor up enough to be comfortable.  The only heating we have in our bathrooms in the new house is electric towel rails, run from a time switch so they only come on for an hour or two morning and evening. They work fine, but there are times when I wish I'd fitted electric UFH mat in them as well, as it is pretty cheap to install, if done before laying floor tiles, and doesn't cost a lot to run if on a programmable thermostat.

 

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In our old house there used to be just a radiator in the bathroom, and I replaced that with a "dual fuel" towel rail (it was both electric and ran off the heating) plus UFH matting under the tiles.

 

For the new house we just have an electric towel rail in each bathroom, so no UFH (we have no heating at all on the first floor), and we've had maybe three or four mornings when it would have been nice to have the floor in the bathroom slightly warmer.  It's no big deal, just a comfort thing really, as the bathrooms are plenty warm enough without any heating.

 

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It might be, if you think that the bathroom floor could be a bit chilly in the non-heating season.  The electric UFH mat isn't very expensive, so if you think you may want to take the chill off the bathroom floor when the main UFH isn't on then it may be worth fitting. 

 

My view of electric UFH is that it's mainly a comfort thing, than a way to heat the room.  It is nice to have floor tiles warmed up a bit when you're using the bathroom, but if you're thinking of using flooring in the bathroom that isn't as cold to the touch as tiles then it may not be an issue.  Our bedrooms have bamboo flooring, with no UFH, and they are fine when walking around with bare feet, it's just the travertine flooring in the bathrooms that can feel a bit chilly every now and again.

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Electric *and* water UFH? Interesting thought. And one that I'm likely going to spend some time on today, now...

 

My current plan is for two manifolds- a 12-way for all the downstairs underfloor as well as a loop for the upstairs bathrooms, and a 7-way run at a higher temp for towel rails as well as provisioning for rads in the upstairs beds.

I'm thinking that as I'm heating a thermal store in the summer for DHW anyway, the small amount of heat needing to be tapped off it for towel rails and 1x60m loop for the two bathrooms won't be a killer. But a straight electric option for both is worthy of consideration.

(oh, no mains gas, but ASHP, PV and a boilerstove)

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@JSHarris, makes sense. I assume that it would also provide a modicum of infra-red warm feeling too.

 

Electric matting is there to compensate for flooring with high thermal conductivity (which thus can feel cold to the touch of a bare foot) and probably mainly in the summer when space heating is off.

 

This could imply that such electric matting in a bathroom could be limited to only areas with foot traffic, which is perhaps lower coverage than would be installed if the matting was for space heating.

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10 minutes ago, Dreadnaught said:

How is the matting controlled given that its purpose is to raise the temperature of the tiles not the room?

 

The matting I fitted in our old house used a programmable thermostat that used a sensor that was embedded in the floor under the tiles, so it sensed the floor temperature, rather than the room temperature.

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1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

Floor drying would be my top objective for a heated floor in a bathroom.  Is 100w/m effective for drying a floor?

 

Yep seems to - MVHR or ventilation are the real key to drying anywhere quickly. 

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We've found that the floor, towels, shower screen etc all dry very quickly with no UFH.  MVHR is very effective at drying things in the house, so much so that I fitted one of those Victorian style hoist-up clothes dryers in our utility room, so that when hoisted up it's just under the MVHR extract terminal.  Anything put on there dries very quickly, faster than putting it on an outside line very often.

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Agree with @PeterW and @JSHarris, it's the relative humidity that makes the most difference to drying, not the temperature. I've got some washing drying in the kitchen at the moment with a dehumidifier running. RH when I first got the washing out, with some on the radiator, shot up to about 70% and the first batch took quite a while to be dry enough to put in other parts of the house to finish off. Now the dehum has got it back down to about 55% even a towel not on the radiator is drying quickly. Room temperature's only about 16°C.

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26 minutes ago, Ed Davies said:

shot up to about 70% and the first batch took quite a while to be dry enough to put in other parts of the house to finish off. Now the dehum has got it back down to about 55% even a towel not on the radiator is drying quickly. Room temperature's only about 16°C.

 

 

What do you use to track these environmental variables including CO2?

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1 hour ago, Ed Davies said:

Room temperature's only about 16°C.

 

29 minutes ago, Russell griffiths said:

16 degrees, good god you northern lot are tough @Ed Davies

 

 

My bedroom is only ever 16 / 17 degrees and I'm from daan saaf (originally). Clearly as the outside temperatures are lower up here we appreciate 16 degrees far more than you guys living in the south :)

 

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11 hours ago, Russell griffiths said:

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 ?????.

Right I want to be known as Russell from now on as I asked this question not long ago and nobody replied.

Can i fit an electric mat heating above the wet pipe system?

 

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52 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

What do you use to track these environmental variables including CO2?

 

I have three sensors made by a chap in Sofia who's, unfortunately, given up on the project and gone off to do other things. They all have temperature and humidity, one has CO₂ and pressure as well. The basic ones were quite cheap, about €20 each I think, but the one with the CO₂ sensor was a bit more, around €80 which was still pretty good as a CO₂ sensor alone can cost that much in 1-off quantities. I got the CO₂ sensor one first through backing his Kickstarter project. They're based on the ESP8266 and report their readings over Wi-Fi in various ways. I use them to send MQTT messages to a mosquitto broker running on a Raspberry Pi then have my own software to log and display the results. The actual boards and things inside are all pretty much commodity items from the likes of AdaFruit and Sparkfun or from China though I think he might have got the CO₂ sensor board made up. What was good was that he did the software and packed them up in neat little 3D-printed cases.

 

The other week I got a couple of ESP32 boards: the newer, larger and slightly more power-hungry development of the ESP8266. With some previous experience of Arduino programming and lots of on-line resources it was very quick and easy to get one set up with a 1-wire temperature sensor to add logging of the living room temperature to my data collection.

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1 hour ago, Russell griffiths said:

16 degrees, good god you northern lot are tough

 

My study where I spend most of the day is around 23°C most of the time. With a bit of cooking the kitchen warms up as well. But, yep, I have put a heater on in there to boost the temperature a few times this winter. And, yep, I'm from dahn saaf, too, Walthamstow originally.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Anything over 16 degrees in the bedroom and I’m uncomfortable, anything over 18degrees in the kitchen / living room and I’m opening doors...... It’s strange as I spent 10 years in Australia (6 years ago) and loved the heat, i guess one just adapts to their local climate and here on the west coast I am either outside or in unheated environments from 8am till 5pm so anything above that is great !  

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