New house and underfloor heating - help!

[paddingtonbear1]

We moved into our new place last Friday. The main kitchen/diner has no radiator which we never noticed when we looked round! After looking in various cupboards we suspect there is a wet underfloor heating system, but it doesn't appear to work. Does anyone have any experience? We've never had UFH before and haven't been left any instructions. I've tried to contact the previous owner (he left his number) but no joy.

Have you found a thermostat in the room anywhere?

The control box bit has a battery in it - a round button type battery. If ours stops working thats what it’s been!

Somewhere near the boiler there will be a manifold with valves and pipes. There should be stats in each room.

Is there a thermostat in the kitchen? We have 1, one in the entrance hall for the mail heating and another in the kitchen for the UFH, if the battery goes in that it won't come on.

We just had a switch on the wall for ours

My UFH console/pipework is under the stairs.

Thanks all. There seems to be 1 thermostat for the whole house, most rooms have radiators which work OK. There is a manifold and pipes in an under stairs cupboard - no idea how it's meant to work though! The pipes around it seem hot but the floor remains cold so it's not getting through for some reason?

So the pipes leading to and from the manifold are hot? If yes, then sounds like the heating is working. I'm guessing if it's just for your kitchen/diner there are probably only 2 or 3 zones max? You can tell this by the number of valves on the top of the manifold. Does the manifold have its own pump? If it does is this working?
Perhaps more simply, the heating is actually working and you don't realise. UFH takes much longer to heat up than radiators, so if you only have the heating on for an hour or two, you won't really notice it getting hot. You need to give the slab time to heat up and then keep it ticking over. If the house was unoccupied before you moved in, the slab will have gone completely cold.
Also, don't expect to be able to fry an egg on the floor! The floor will get gently warm and that will be sufficient. We have UFC throughout and in the rooms with tiled floors, the floor doesn't feel cold, but neither is it "hot". We have carpet in the bedroom and when you walk on the carpet it doesn't feel especially warm, but if you leave a towel/clothes there for a while when you pick it up then you know it's warm!

It is quite unusual not to have an individual thermostat in a room with underfloor heating.

My house had broken UFH heating downstairs when I moved, luckily the sellers had warned me! There is one small radiator downstairs and that’s it. I just use a plug in radiator for additional heat when needed, which isn’t often, an electric heated thrown when working / sitting down, and remind myself that it’s good for a kitchen to be cold!

@mateysmum the pipes leading from where the boiler is are hot. The pipe at the top of the manifold feels hot too, however lower down isn't and the room remains very cold. There appears to be 4 valves.

I guess we'll have to get someone out to look at it. What a pain! We've only been here since last Friday.

How long have you been leaving it on for? As mateysmum has stated above (in a far better way than I could attempt!) UFH takes ages to actually warm the floor and it won't have much affect on heating up a large room like kitchen/ dining room. It just makes a tiled floor more bearable to walk on barefooted

Hopefully it's something simple but not obvious to the lay person.

@ohidoliketobe we've had it on since mid afternoon - my in-laws were coming over and we wanted to make it warm for them.

Thanks for the compliment! Our UFH is the most efficient heating I have ever had. When working properly it warms large tiled spaces very well and doesn't leave cold spots like radiators can.

Can you not contact them via your solicitors? Surely this is something you can report in the first week

Assuming its wet underfloor, it works on the same principle as rads. Stat is set to a temperature, senses if it needs heat, switches on and warm water runs through pipes to heat the floor. You will see the valves on the manifold open up if its on. Try turning the stat up really high - 30 or so - and see what happens. It may have an airlock and need balancing.

Ours warms up really quickly.

You may just need the flow temp increased by the way.

Is the thermostat in the kitchen? Have you turned it up until it clicks on? On ours i have to turn it up just over 20 for it to click on and then it takes about 2 hours before the floor feels really warm. At this time of year we have it on all day but off at night. Once it gets warmed up it stays that way and takes over an hour ti start cooling down so set it to go off about 9-10 in the evening.

you should also have a control panel somewhere hear the boiler to control when the heating and hot water comes on, make sure the heating is set to come on during the day.

As others have said, turn the thermostat right up and leave the heating on for the day. If none of the thermostat twiddling works, YouTube may be your friend. There are loads of vlogs about UFH on there. If you know the make of your heating (may be a sticker on the manifold) there may be a specific vlog and there will at least be videos of how the valves and taps should look (might one of the taps be shut, stopping the flow of the water?). I'd try all this before calling a heating engineer. If you think hot water is getting as far as the manifold there's probably not much wrong, it might need bleeding or balancing, just like a normal radiator system.
Likewise, if you know the make, google and you may get and instructions.
I'm not an expert by any means, but I live in a house with 3 manifolds and 21 heating zones, so over the years you work out the quirks!!

Ok we are getting somewhere I think :)
The previous owners changed the thermostat recently, there were 2 on the wall 1 in the kitchen downstairs and the other on the upstairs landing. Both were switched off. Apparently the new thermostat was supposed to control all the heating, this can't be the case though as we tried switching the kitchen one back on and something is happening! All the pipes around the manifold in the cupboard are hot and the temp gauge has gone up to 60 deg. The floor is barely warm after a few hours though, is this normal? It's just not as cold as the hallway (same flooring). It will have been switched off for a week!

Great stuff! I would give it a bit more time. When we switch ours on after the summer, it heats the rooms after a couple of hours, but realistically it takes a day at least for the slab to thoroughly warm through. After that it just ticks over. You have to change the mentality slightly from radiator systems. Better to leave the system on for much longer (some say all the time) but control temperature timings via an intelligent thermostat. If you have it coming on just for an hour or two it will be very inefficient. We are in the house most of the time so have ours on from about 6am to 10pm, but unless it's really cold, the boiler barely comes on as the house is well insulated.

I would worry less about the temperature of the floor and rather check the room temperature is going up.