underfloor heating and floor choice hell

[itsnotfairisit]

We are about to install underfloor heating and an air pump. It's doing my head in! Husband had done lots of calcs and claims wood - engineered - isn't as good as stone or tile. I HATE tiles in a house - they has a cold look. I'm willing to do stone through the centre section (it's an old farmhouse with a central corridor) - the thought being it'll be like a radiator in the core, but I want engineered wood in the rooms with rugs. He says rugs will be like duvets preventing the heat.

Arghhhh! I don't want an austere house, I want it cosy and colourful!

For context when I met him he had a flat (solvent chap) but didn't think it needed curtains and lived in it like a monk.

Can people describe what they have and how they make mixes of hard flooring work in underfloor heated houses? x

when we refurbed our previous house we had ufh, and like you I didn’t want tiles in the living spaces. So we had tiles in the kitchen and engineered wood in the through living but with rugs and yeah we couldn’t feel the ufh in the wooded bit. It was disappointing so I would thing hard about that. Also if you had ufh heating with engineered wood you couldn’t have the floor temp above a certain temp either ( so not the room temp but actual floor) as it affected the flooring.

Urgh. Thank you. Even tho I didn’t want people backing DH up!

We have LVT Amtico and works well

We have underfloor heating with engineered wood herringbone flooring and it’s completely fine. I’d definitely go for wood over tile.

My DD has UFH throughout the ground floor with tiles on top. It looks beautiful and isn’t at all cold looking. I’m afraid he’s correct about the rugs though.
They’re similar to these.
https://www.tilemountain.co.uk/sandwood-dark-oak-wood-effect-matt-porcelain-floor-tile

We have underfloor hearting and solid wood parquet, engineered wood, laminate and tile and rugs in various rooms. I dont find the tile and warmer than any of the other surfaces. Mind you I dont walk around bare foot. Our house is always cosy and warm when you walk in and thats what counts.

What about the tiles that look like wood?
https://www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk/collections/wood-effect-tiles

You could always try the rugs or have them down in the summer?

What about porcelain tiles that looks like wood? As an example https://www.stonesuperstore.co.uk/nordic-cognac-walnut-porcelain-tiles?pid=12149&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22989973356&gbraid=0AAAAAD4nnC3J_mt6Qb5N_u5RiI-YThK3Y&gclid=Cj0KCQiAubrJBhCbARIsAHIdxD8BGqiUx93c4EMYDASHKUM3cNnju9X9-NimZ-9KF0QkMi6EPgXW_bkaAiprEALw_wcB

Wood is fine. Heat rises so any heat you put into the underfloor heating will come up through the floor. You can even have carpet on underfloor heating.

Amtico or Karndean, definitely not engineered wood

We have porcelain all the way through downstairs and the underfloor heating works like a dream, even when it’s really cold the floor continues to radiate heat when the heating is off and we don’t ever have our heating on constantly. Upstairs we have engineered oak and it works really well too, probably not quite so well but we want the upstairs a little cooler. The bathrooms are all porcelain and there is so much joy on a cold morning to step out of the shower onto a warm floor. I think your husband is right about the rugs but wood would work it just might not be so energy efficient.

kardean - looks good for much longer with less hassle than engineeed wood , less slippery and hard than tiles , only yesterday someone said how warm my living room looks

with a heat pump isn’t the heat on pretty much all the time so the rugs will be ambient temperature anyway ?

Ive got a large persian rug over my underfloor heating and its fine - gets lovely and warm. I agree with not wanting stone/tiled floors everywhere but we inherited hard floors. However we have wood floors upstairs which also warm up nicely with ufh.

We have porcelain tiles throughout the whole ground floor and they are easy to clean and feel lovely when warm. We have engineered wood upstairs on landing and it can be slippery. I second the porcelain tiles in wood effect option.

Not meaning to be entirely negative, but are you really, really sure on the underfloor heating in an old house, with an air source heat pump?

We have an old house and underfloor heating in some rooms. I might as well be burning £50 notes for heat, it’s is eye wateringly expensive (electric underfloor) and just not that warm, they really are just never warm, perhaps they’re ’not cold’.

And we use an air pump for another source of heating for another old building and it is so expensive. £40 a day once the temp drops to mid / low teens at night. We don’t use it at all after September, it would be pointless.

On both the underfloor and air source we found the sales people over promised. Granted, we are in an old house, I’m sure in new houses it might work well.

We have a farmhouse and have rustic oak tiles throughout the downstairs. People often comment on our original wooden floor (it is incredibly realistic) and a million times easier to maintain than the real oak we had previously. It conducts the UFH really well. It took us a year and about 100 sample tiles to choose it though...

Team tile here, sorry. There are SO many options between colour and texture, including wooden ones, I'm sure you will find one that pleases you. Plus, you just need to wipe (or hose!) to get it clean again.

Could you share a picture or the details of these tiles please?

I don't know if this will work but I've tried to attach some zoomed in pictures (so my family don't recognise them). We originally discounted these as looking too rustic but the very many samples of other wood just looked too modern or too fake. These have worn nail marks and darker bits. We had a couple of darker ones that we put in front of an open fire. We laid them in a random plank pattern and used dark brown grout, they look exactly like the wood they replaced. I see that Topps tiles do a similar one, mora oak in the darkish brown colour- in fact I think I did a Google image search on that one at the time and bought mine much cheaper from the manufacturer under the brand name (and can't for the life of me remember what it was)

The picture didn't work

We have engineered lacquered oak. I find tiles cold (atmosphere wise) and too echoey.

We have engineered wood with UFH, and although it never feels very warm to the touch, the house is always warm. It’s like it gives a constant gentle heat (including when it’s off, as PP said). It works well for us.

We have UFH and microcement in the kitchen/dining area, engineered oak boards everywhere else. The microcement feels warmer, but the wood is also fine. We haven't put any rugs down as wood floor guy said it could potentially overheat and distort/discolour/damage the wood. Not sure if that's true though

Wet UFH and engineered wood here too. The floor feels "un-cold" rather than really warm, I would say, but the heating is very effective at keeping the room warm. So if you desperately want that "oooh the floor feels so warm on my toes" feeling, don't get engineered wood. But from a practical perspective it's absolutely fine. I did a lot of research first. Choose engineered boards which the manufacturer states are compatible with UFH.
We also have carpet over UFH and it also works fine. The combined tog rating of carpet and underlay needs to be less than 2.5. You get special underlay for UFH - it has a low tog rating and has holes in it. I assume with rugs you just need to be sensible about thickness.

We have a mixture - tiles in the kitchen and (large) hall - so all the high traffic/dirtiest areas and then engineered wood in the living rooms, both are fine. We also have rugs in all the living areas and not problem with the UFH. We have UFH upstairs too and that's fully carpeted. You just have to make sure whatever you choose is suitable for UFH. I wouldn't want a stark white tile, but ours are a warm stone colour.