Positioning of Plant room.

[Moggaman]

Hi.

I was wondering from a plumbers point of view, is there a right or wrong place to situate a Plant Room in a new design.

I have located mine upstairs and hope to have hot water tank and other associated bits there too.

I aim to have UF heating downstairs (probably not upstairs) and wondered does the Manifold or bits and pieces related to the UF heating have to be downstairs or is this a non issue?

 

Thanks

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Speaking purely from personal experience, I really, really wish I'd designed our house so that the plant room was downstairs.  Having heavy kit on the first floor is a PITA, that was rammed home further last year, when I swapped our old Sunamp PV (~70kg) for a new Sunamp UniQ 9 eHW (~160kg)...

[joe90]

Our plant room is downstairs, it’s more like a plant cupboard in the cloakroom, with a washing machine etc (all the crap) and it’s right next to the ASHP on the outside so very short pipe runs. Glad we did it this way.

[newhome]

Mine is downstairs off the utility room and all of the heating kit, central vacuum, electric meters etc are in there. Seems to work well. The one thing I wish was different was that the MVHR unit was in there too instead of the loft. The more inaccessible stuff is the more PITA it becomes. I have a thermal store and whilst the losses from that aren't huge everything that is lost goes straight into the utility room that helps to warm the house (I keep the plant room door open in winter for that reason). 

[AliG]

I tried to keep stuff on the ground floor and out of the lofts but the various service people kept trying to move things. I ended up with most stuff downstairs but still 2 MVHR units in the loft.

 

Maybe they like to make them inaccessible so they can charge you to service them.

 

I insisted on stuff being on the ground floor and close to doors so that if it ever broke it could be easily swapped out. I always got the answer back that it doesn't usually break. Again maybe not, but why not make life easier for yourself.

[Triassic]

The other thing you need to consider is the route the various service pipes will take, look out for structural elements that can’t be drilled or notched.

[ProDave]

I started off with the concept of a "plant room" but rapidly decided different things needed to be in different places.

 

The only thing in my "plant room" now is the MVHR unit and a pump and some controls for the central heating.  It made a LOT more sense to put the hot water tank somewhere else, now is what will be an airing cupboard off the small bedroom where it has the shortest runs of hot water piping to all the taps.

 

Don't get over fixated by trying to put all the "stuff" in one place,  Some of it may be better somewhere else.

 

I am reminded of my plumber friend who has a house twice the size of mine, with the hot water tank in the plant room in the diametrically opposite corner of the house tot he kitchen sink tap.

[ragg987]

Plant can be noisy, so if adjacent to bedrooms you have a potential problem. Noise can be direct, which is easier to muffle, but also beware sound transmitted by vibration of surfaces. Our MVHR is wall mounted and I can hear it in the toilet next door - this type of noise is not as easy to stop.

[NSS]

Our plant room is within the footprint of the house but only accessible from the garage. This meant the walls between it and the living accommodation could be well insulated acoustically but also form an additional vapour seal as almost all penetrations to/from the outside world come in/out of the plant room.

[Big Neil]

9 hours ago, NSS said:

plant room is within the footprint of the house but only accessible from the garage

 

I was thinking of this. just a sort of deep alcove off the back corner of the garage, such that it is relatively central to the house, then  it could be sectioned off where required to either keep stuff cool or warm as is required. I suppose one could put an MVHR extract duct in that area to remove warm air to at least some degree??

[TerryE]

Like @joe90 we don't have a plant room per se. We have a plant cupboard off in our ground floor toilet which houses our potable water and UFH manifolds, SunAmps, Willis, etc. It's central location (keeping all runs balanced) is more important / useful than size. Our MVHR manifolds are directly above in an eaves cupboard on our second floor. Again it's central location helps balance the runs.  The MVHR itself is in an adjacent storage room.

[NSS]

2 hours ago, Big Neil said:

 

I was thinking of this. just a sort of deep alcove off the back corner of the garage, such that it is relatively central to the house, then  it could be sectioned off where required to either keep stuff cool or warm as is required. I suppose one could put an MVHR extract duct in that area to remove warm air to at least some degree??

Ours has the MVHR unit, PV inverter, SageGlass control panel, consumer unit and meters, and the UFH manifold and associated pipework coming in from the ASHP. Gets quite warm in there but not excessively. Our DHW cylinder is in an airing cupboard the other side of the wall from the plant room.

[Moggaman]

thanks all for your comments. I will try and keep things centrally located. Nothing in the comments tells me that it is a plumbing no no to have plant room upstairs , just perhaps a logistics problem in certain circumstances?

[TerryE]

Yup there's nothing to stop having a plant room on an upper floor, but just remember that you'll end up carrying some heavy kit up there and the floor has to be designed to take the required load. 

[lizzie]

one of the plus points of building single storey ??

[le-cerveau]

10 hours ago, Moggaman said:

thanks all for your comments. I will try and keep things centrally located. Nothing in the comments tells me that it is a plumbing no no to have plant room upstairs , just perhaps a logistics problem in certain circumstances?

My plant room is upstairs, 2 x MVHR, ASHP (internal unit), boiler, 4 x SunAmp, 3-Phase switchboard...

However I have solid concrete floors (pr-estressed planks + screed) and a lift!

[Bitpipe]

Mine is in basement, under the utility and adjacent to kitchen - was a bit of an afterthought in the design but all incoming services (power, water, gas) come in here and the MVHR external vents are directly above in the utility wall. Contains gas boiler (flue through utility), UVC, MVHR and power distribution.

 

There's no heating in the basement so the UFHG manifold is on ground floor in a cupboard.

 

As we have a pumped hot return, no issues on DHW performance but the MVHR was tricky to balance as some runs are a few metres long and others are tens of metres.

[Moggaman]

On 06/03/2019 at 06:28, le-cerveau said:

My plant room is upstairs, 2 x MVHR, ASHP (internal unit), boiler, 4 x SunAmp, 3-Phase switchboard...

However I have solid concrete floors (pr-estressed planks + screed) and a lift!

Thanks...Im going to leave out the lift!

[Pete]

We have a lift designed into our build but are not installing it when we build. We are using the two rooms, one above each other as you would expect, for storage etc but not putting any pipes/cables through the floor section and have put in some structural timbers to form an opening for the lift to move through. We only want the lift in case we cannot use the stairs when we are older and at the moment if you need a lift installing for disability reasons then you do not pay VAT so we saw no reason to fit it until we need it.