Engineered wood floor with underfloor heating

[Soontobe60]

Can anyone who has underfloor heating with an engineered wood floor tell me if they would recommend it? I’ve heard that there can be issues with the EW flooring when UFH is installed! As it’s going to cost an arm and a leg, I want to get it right. The sellers of EW say it’s fine - but they would wouldn’t they?

The sellers will say it's fine meaning it won't damage the floor, but they can't tell you whether it will be adequate heating for the room. You might live in a barn with no door for all they know.
The supplier will tell you the temperature limit and ideally how insulating the flooring is. You can use that together with the floor area to calculate the heat input into the room.
You also need to calculate the heat loss for the room and check if it's adequate.
If not you will need supplementary heating ie radiator or similar.

Thanks. My concern is actually if the heating affects the stability of the flooring.

@Soontobe60 We have it in our own home and in our holiday home. Both have been installed for 15 years. Both absolutely fine. You really don’t need to worry. As long as the floor is recommended for this type of heating, there is no issue.

We have it in our house, the previous owners installed it (don’t know when) and we’ve lived in the house for 18 months. It has been fantastic, I am pleasantly surprised! The room is 30 foot by 14 foot and the only other heat sources are 1 radiator and an electric fire installed in a media wall but we don’t need the electric fire on at all as it’s toasty without. The house was built in 1990 so it’s pretty well insulated.
No issues at all with the stability of the flooring and we had the engineered wood sanded down and revarnished last year.

In terms of the UFH affecting the flooring, the only issue I have heard about is that you mustn’t let the floor get above a certain temperature - I think it’s 27 or 28 degrees. That is the temperature of the floor itself, not the room temp.

This means you have to be careful about thick rugs and large floorstanding furniture (eg sofas without legs) as they can get hot spots underneath them which go above this temperature. Then the flooring can be affected.

Other than that, it’s fine. It’s slower to heat up than UFH under, say, tiles but it does work.

Thinner EW flooring works better with UFH. Don’t go above c. 15mm thickness. Probably anything thicker will say it’s unsuitable for UFH (or it should do anyway).

No problems in our rental with this. I'd say the flooring is 12 years old (as the house is 13). Haven't noticed a lack of stability in the room it's in.

Underfloor heating with stone floors is a different matter. It takes 5 hours for the heat to get through and warm the room up.

We have 2 houses and have it in both. One for 10 years and the other for 5. No issues with either.

We have it all through our downstairs and no probs at all. It's been down for 15 years and never had a problem recently had it sanded and re finished and it fine.

We have this in our kitchen, 2 years in it’s been great. However, the kitchen is really warm (modern well insulated extension) so it doesn’t go on that much. So no idea how well it works in colder spaces.

I have it in the coldest room in the house and it's really really efficient. Windows on 3 sides and a chimney plus being on the corner of the house = balls off cold.

It's extremely quick and efficient at raising the temperature in this room.

We have both waterproof laminate (basement family room) and a wonderful aged/distressed oak engineered wood floor in the 'best room' both with underfloor heating. Been down for nearly four years now - absolutely fine!

We have rugs but quite fine ones. No thick wool shag piles!

We have engineered wood throughout our house with wet underfloor heating, we went for the thickest we could get away with (21mm I think) and it's fantastic, no regrets. We have rugs in a couple of rooms, fairly thin rugs, not thick pile or shaggy and this has been fine for the past 6 years.

This is not our experience, we have it in a cold room (terrace but N facing and large victorian single glazed windows) and it does take a while to heat the room. In the winter we end up leaving the heating on overnight in this room, not on full but at say 15, otherwise it takes half the day to heat up the next day.

Our house is only 13 years old and is fully doubled glazed, so it’s good at retaining heat.

Just to add - it is wet underfloor heating from ground source

Thanks everyone!

To retain heat in Victorian houses that have no wall cavity, poor insulation and single glazing is a challenge for any heating system. Where we have uf heating, the construction is modern. All heating works more efficiently with modern construction and insulation.