Underfloor heating: the perfect partner for your heat pump

Every radiator in your house is a small negotiation you lost. It owns the best wall. The sofa cannot go where you wanted.

It roasts the air next to it while the far corner stays cold, and the dust rides the convection current round the room.

Underfloor heating deletes the negotiation. The whole floor becomes the emitter, warmth rises evenly through the room, and every wall comes back to you.

It is not a luxury bolt-on. It is the physics done properly: a huge, gentle surface instead of one small, hot one.

It is silent, there is nothing hot to lean against, and with no convection current there is less dust on the move.

The water in the floor runs at 35 to 40 degrees instead of a radiator's 60 to 75, so it is the single best thing you can lay in front of a heat pump.

A bit random, but I have always liked it: most people assume underfloor heating started with the Romans. It did not. It goes back further than that, to ancient Greece.

When Elevate design your system, this is who works it out. Each system is built from proven components, with board, pipe and controls selected per project and designed in house on Elevate's own drawings.

You are not paying for a badge, you are paying for the design.

A radiator is a small surface, so it needs very hot water. A floor is an enormous surface, so it barely needs warm water. That single fact is the whole story.

Heat pumps are at their best making low-temperature water: the lower the flow temperature, the less electricity used. As a rule of thumb every degree lower saves roughly 2 to 3%.

Feed underfloor heating at 35 degrees and the heat pump settles into its most efficient range all winter. It is the most efficient pairing in domestic heating, which is why we design the two together.

Radiant warmth also lets you feel comfortable with the air a degree or two cooler, and every degree off the thermostat is money back.

If you are considering a heat pump, decide on underfloor first, because it changes the design for the better.

We design and install both. Every heat pump installation we do is MCS certified through our independent certification partner, so the government grant of £7,500 to £9,000 is protected. See our heat pump page.

Nobody local publishes underfloor prices. Here are the real shapes of it.

New build or full renovation is the cheap way in: the ground floor is pipe clipped into the insulation before the screed goes down, and nationally, supplied-and-installed prices run £100 to £140 per square metre.

Retrofit costs more, nationally £150 to £190 per square metre, because overlay panels replace what the screed gave you for nearly nothing. That is roughly double new build.

So we will sometimes tell you to do the ground floor now and leave upstairs on radiators. Mixed systems work fine and we design them all the time.

Electric underfloor is cheap to buy and costly to run: around three times the running cost of a wet system, and it cannot run off a heat pump.

When the cable eventually fails, the floor comes up. Fine for a single ensuite. Wet pipe is guaranteed for 50 years.

Your two cost drivers: floor area and floor finish. Glued vinyl needs a cement-faced panel where carpet needs only standard board, and that difference is real money, which is another reason the design comes before the quote.

Most people who would love underfloor heating never ask, because they assume it means digging up the floors. It has not meant that for years.

Modern overlay systems go over your existing floor at 15 to 20mm, about the thickness of two pound coins (Energy Saving Trust on underfloor heating). Doors trimmed, skirting adjusted, warm floor.