Suspended Timber floors
These systems use components beneath the structural floor deck of the floor to conduct heat from the pipe to the underside of the floor deck.
Typically, aluminium plates are used to conduct the heat from the pipe to the floor surface, with some lower performance systems using either a cementitious layer or an air layer to diffuse the heat within the floor.
With these systems it is important that the pipes transfer heat evenly across the floor surface without any sharp variations in the surface temperature. This is especially important with natural wood boarded floors to prevent hot spots that may cause shrinkage.
Some solutions for joisted and battened floors use dedicated hUFH structural flooring panels that have been profiled to receive pipe and aluminium diffusers. This places the aluminium diffusers above the structural floor deck, typically reducing the thermal resistance of the layers above the pipe by approximately 1.0-1.5 tog, increasing systems efficiency accordingly.
Systems using aluminium diffusers are more efficient as their response time in combination with a timber floor is much faster than screeded floors .
To read more about how UFH works with different floor finishes, click here.