Can you have thick carpet over wet underfloor heating?

[guineas34]

We are looking at buying a house with wet underfloor heating throughout the ground floor. However, I've always loved carpet and would want this in the large living room - at the moment there is a wood floor. Are you limited as to which carpet you can have over it? Does it need to be thinner/special carpet? Would we lose some of the heat if we did this? Thanks

I have wet underfloor heating and a carpet over it in the living room. It was like that when I bought it. It is OK but takes longer to heat up, it does stay warm longer though

Wood floor isn’t supposed to get above a particular temperature (I think 27/28, this is the floor temperature not the room temperature) or it can damage the floor. A thick rug on top of a wood floor with ufh can cause the temperature to get too high under the rug.

This is what the official advice says but tbh I don’t know of anyone who has had this problem in reality.

A rug definitely does slow down the room heating up. Wood is quite slow to heat up anyway and rug slows it further. So basically you end up keeping the heating on all the time in winter as otherwise the room doesn’t warm up till the afternoon.

It probably depends on the temperature the floor is heated to. We once had it in a house we were doing up, but it was a large thick rug. There’s nothing nicer than sitting on a warm carpet. Cats love it too.

Find out if the heating is zoned, ie can you separate the heating for individual areas?

Perhaps get a very large area rug instead of wall to wall. That way the underlay won’t impede the heat as well.

We have a couple of thin rugs over ours. It’s fine. Thick carpet - no. Won’t work effectively. It will cost you more to run. In this day and age it’s not sensible to prevent optimum working.

You can have carpet, but you need special underlay, which a good carpet shop will know about. I’d go to a local independent who knows what they’re talking about.

We had electric underfloor heating under engineered wood in a conservatory, just as background heating- mostly to keep the frost out. It was fine, but the temp of the heating had to be kept fairly low. You're not supposed to have the electric sort under 'proper' wood (like parquet). Not sure how wt underfloor compares with electric, though.

We're getting wet UFH installed ATM and have been told carpet and underlay should be a max of 3 tog in total. We've decided on underlay intended for UFH which is 1.1 tog and some carpet that is 1.4 tog.

The really thick luxury carpet ranges weren't suitable, but the standard ones were, so we've been able to find some we really like.

We have just gone through this as part of our reno (we have wet ufh upstairs and downstairs) We ended up going with campeone collection cabernet. It is about £60 SQM but is 1 tog and really soft. What you tend to find is just cheap basic carpet for low tog rating so this was worth the money for us. We also had ufh carpet underlay that has little holes in it to let the heat through to the carpet. Good luck!

Did you have the carpet fitted over hardwood flooring? Thanks

My understanding is that if you’re gonna go with underfloor heating, it’s most cost-effective and efficient with tiles anything else is almost like a battle between the two you’ve got the carpet insulated to keep the heat in and the underfloor heating trying to push the floor out.

@3BSHKATS Your understanding is wrong. UFH is compatible with engineered wood, LVT and ceramic tiles. So quite a bit of choice.

Quite a bit of choice of three ? Okay then

? So a 4th would be carpet. What else do you want on a floor? Leather, rubber (would need to check), concrete (ok) or stone - definitely ok. Did you want 6in deep shag pile?

No you would need to pull up the wood flooring and then have your carpet laid.

It’ll be less efficient, less effective and more costly to run.