High efficiency from a low-temperature system

Products: ThermoDEK™, The Continal® Screed system

When installers find a supplier they can rely on to provide excellent service, they’ll come back to them again and again whenever they’re working on a building project. A longstanding customer of Continal Underfloor Heating contacted us recently to quote for the underfloor heating (UFH) system for a four-floor sea-front property located in Cornwall.

This significant renovation project covered a floor area of 382m2, which included a basement and three above-ground floors, all of which needed to be heated using UFH connected to an air-source heat pump.

The homeowner was happy for the basement floor to be dug out to allow a traditional screed system to be installed, but the upper three floors required an UFH system that could be completed quickly, with no time available for a screed floor to dry, and very little space for floor heights to be built up.

The homeowner also wanted to make the home as green as possible, so an efficient and well insulated UFH system was key considering the vast size of the property, but the project also needed to be completed with minimal disturbance to the rest of the building works.

Considering these constraints, our Technical Adviser Troy Wyse recommended Continal’s ThermoDEK™-18 overfloor system, which has a solid gypsum dry-screed panel at its heart. ThermoDEK™ can be laid directly over existing floors, providing a high-output, low-profile, high-strength solution that can be installed quickly with no delays for drying screed. It is suitable for both high and low-temperature systems, which makes it perfect when used in combination with an air-source heat pump. We also encouraged them to insulate the upper three floors from below to further improve efficiency levels and make sure no heat output was lost.

ThermoDEK™ can be covered with many common floor finishes including engineered wood, tiles, vinyls and carpets, with some requiring additional finishing layers.

The sheer scale of the renovation across the whole building meant that the site didn’t have any room available for materials to be installed, so we offered to arrange separate deliveries for each floor of the property, timed to be delivered exactly when the UFH work on a specific floor was ready to begin. This meant the UFH could be fitted a floor at a time, without any concerns that other tradespeople would have to work around piles of waiting product, and also reducing the risk that any materials would be damaged or lost on site.

Our customer said he was, once again, very pleased with the support Continal had been able to offer him during the build, especially around the flexible deliveries and the support in designing a low-temperature system that would offer high efficiency using an air-source heat pump as the fuel source.