Even, quiet, radiant warmth from the floor up. Wet or electric systems, sized to the room, plumbed and commissioned to deliver comfort you actually notice — without the running-cost horror stories.
Family-run engineers · WaterSafe approved · Fully insured to £5m
Underfloor heating (UFH) replaces radiators with warm pipe or heating cable buried in the floor construction. Wet (hydronic) UFH runs on your boiler or heat pump; electric UFH runs off a dedicated circuit and suits small rooms and refurbs. Both are managed by zoned controls that let each room hit its own temperature.
Anyone renovating a kitchen, bathroom, extension or open-plan floor; new-builds and self-builders; heat pump customers looking for the ideal emitter; and homeowners fed up of hot rads eating wall space where they'd rather have furniture.
When floors are up during a renovation, when you're pairing with a heat pump, when a room has cold spots that radiators never solved, and when a tiled bathroom or kitchen floor feels punishingly cold underfoot in winter.
UFH lives inside the floor build-up. If it's specced wrong or installed sloppily, the fix is a floor rip-up. Proper design (loop lengths, screed depth, insulation below the pipe, correct manifold and controls) is what makes UFH cheap to run and easy to live with.
The two big UFH complaints — 'it doesn't warm up' and 'the bills are shocking' — are almost always design failures. Missing insulation under the pipe, oversized loops, no room-by-room control, or being tied to a boiler that runs at the wrong flow temperature. All fixable with proper design up front.
Without proper insulation under the pipe, up to a third of your heat drives straight down into the slab or ceiling void below. Warm neighbours, cold you.
Loops too long give you a warm start and a cold finish across the same room. The maths matters: loop length is a function of pipe diameter, flow rate and floor construction.
UFH wants ~40°C flow, not 70°C boiler flow. Without a properly set blending valve on the manifold, the pipe overheats, the floor damages, and the boiler short-cycles.
Some retrofit systems (thin overlay boards) work well; others don't. Getting the wrong retrofit product for the situation is an expensive mistake.
Every job follows the same disciplined sequence, so you always know where we are and what's next.
We calculate heat loss per room to size loops correctly and confirm whether UFH alone is enough or needs supplementary heating on the coldest external walls.
Wet vs electric, screed vs overlay panel vs joist system — matched to the floor build-up, height available and how you'll use the room.
Manifold sized to the loops, blending valve set to the design flow temp, wiring centre and per-room thermostats wired for real zone control.
Lay pipe or mat, pressure test before the screed or tiles go down, commission flow rates and balance the manifold.
For screeded systems, a proper warm-up profile before tiling. Then walk-through of the controls and app so you're not fighting the system in month one.
No cold spots, no hot rads, no draughts pulled toward radiators. The whole room sits at temperature.
No radiators means furniture, tall units, glazing and tiling all get their space back.
Low flow temperatures make UFH the ideal emitter for an air source heat pump — high efficiency, low bills.
Every room on its own thermostat and schedule — no more heating unused rooms to warm one.
No ticking pipes, no clicking rads, no cold-morning boiler roar in the bedrooms.
Correctly installed pipe systems are rated for decades — often longer than the boiler or heat pump they're paired with.
Wet UFH (warm water in pipe) is the right answer for whole-floor and extension installs, especially with a heat pump. Electric UFH (heating mat under tile) is the right answer for a single bathroom or en-suite where the running cost per hour matters less than install simplicity and low build-up height.
New screeded floors get pipe clipped to insulation and buried in liquid or sand-cement screed. Suspended timber floors get pipe in aluminium spreader plates between the joists. Refurbs with no floor lift often go on to low-profile overlay panels. Each has different heat output, response time and floor height cost — we pick the right one for your build-up.
Every wet system needs a manifold that matches the loop count, a blending valve to protect the pipe from over-temperature, and a wiring centre that maps thermostats to actuators. Cheap all-in-one boxes rarely balance properly. We spec proper components that stay balanced years in.
Kitchens on tile or LVT respond quickly and evenly — great for morning warmth without firing whole-house heating. Bathrooms benefit hugely from electric mats under tile: warm floor in the morning, off in ten minutes. Open-plan spaces need zoning right — one huge zone under a 60m² floor is the biggest mistake we see.
UFH and heat pumps are a natural pairing — low flow temperatures, high emitter surface area. UFH also runs well on a modern condensing boiler set to lower flow temperature. Older combi boilers can drive UFH but usually need a low-loss header or buffer to stop short-cycling.
Commercial UFH (retail, hospitality, light industrial) uses larger manifolds, longer loops and more robust actuators. We handle small-scale commercial via our commercial services page — same design principles, different scale.
Every image below is from a real Eco Plumbing & Heating Solutions job across Greater Manchester. No stock photography.
In a well-insulated space, correctly designed UFH usually runs at lower flow temperatures than radiators — which makes both boilers and heat pumps more efficient. Whether your bills go down depends on the wider system, controls and how you use the heating.
In most well-insulated modern rooms, yes. In older properties with high heat loss, we sometimes recommend UFH plus one or two radiators on the coldest walls — we work this out at the survey stage.
Yes. Low-profile overlay systems fit on top of existing floors with minimal height gain, and joist-void systems fit between suspended timber joists. We assess the floor build-up before quoting.
A single bathroom electric install is often a day or two. A whole-floor wet system in a new extension typically takes 2–4 days on site depending on size, plus screed drying time before tiling.
Modern PEX and PE-RT UFH pipe is manufacturer-rated for 50 years or more when installed correctly. The manifold, valves and controls have shorter service lives but are easily maintained above the floor.
Yes — with the correct blending valve and flow temperature. Engineered wood and LVT are the most sensitive to flow temp; we set the system up to protect the finish and honour manufacturer max temperatures.
Yes — this is the point. Each room gets its own thermostat and its own actuator on the manifold. That's how UFH runs efficiently: heat where you're using it, not everywhere at once.
Yes — UFH is the ideal emitter for an air source heat pump. We often quote the two together. See our air source heat pump page for detail.
Yes. Workmanship is guaranteed, pipe and components carry manufacturer warranties (up to 50 years on the pipe itself), and we come back for first-year snags.
Yes — we install UFH across Rochdale, Oldham, Manchester, Salford, Bury, Ashton-under-Lyne, Heywood, Middleton, Shaw and surrounding Greater Manchester areas.
Book a free survey and we'll size the system to your rooms, tell you what type of UFH suits your build-up, and quote in writing before you commit.
One team, one standard — across every plumbing and heating job in Greater Manchester.
