We have just moved house, into an old, draughty Victorian house, and our first big job is to have the nearly 30 year old boiler and heating system replaced with a megaflow, pressurised system. We had also planned to, at the same time, put down wet underfloor heating into the living room and the kitchen. We planned to then lay engineered wood over the plumbing in the dining room; and porcelain tiles over the plumbing in the kitchen – we would at the same time be completely redoing the kitchen as it is nearly as old as the boiler!
Best laid plans have gone out of the window in the wake of roof leaks, window repairs and white goods malfunctioning and I am now resigned to the fact that we will need to start saving up again for the kitchen and it will be next year’s project. We are going ahead with boiler and heating upgrade as there’s a very real possibility we may be left without heating if we don’t and I also want to get the underfloor heating down in the living room so we can get the eng wood floor laid and get it, well, snug. HOWEVER, upon asking the plumber if we can do this, there was very definitely sucking of teeth. The living room lies between the boiler and the kitchen and so, he says, we simply cannot do it in this order as pipework for the kitchen u/f heating needs to run under the living room floor to get there. I realised this but I assumed that he could run some ‘dead’ pipework under the living room floor now, before we put the new floor down, presumably from some sort of manifold (or even just loose in the boiler cupboard and unconnected as yet, and have it capped and waiting at a point in the kitchen for when we were in a position to start ripping up the kitchen and laying the U/f heating in there. I don’t even care if we have ugly pipe ends jutting into the kitchen for a year…. Can anybody tell me if this is within the realms of possibility?