Insulating floor when only 50mm available

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Kier70

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We recently bought a house which has a concrete sub floor with a floating frame for flooring on top. The frame is 50mm x 50mm with 18mm floor board.

It’s causing a real problem trying to heat the bedrooms in particular so trying to pre-empt the energy price increases we were looking at air source heating but the engineers all say to upgrade the radiators or get underfloor heating which is my preference if within budget.

So, is this even possible with 50mm available and if so what’s the cheapest way around insulating this absolutely grim 90s inheritance? I’ve heard about kingsman optim-r but when they don’t give a price you know it’s going to be a bit pricey.

Thanks
 
To make an ASHP work most effectively you need to ask it to produce the lowest flow temps possible. This is advantageous if you're not applying a large amount of floor insulation as the lower temperature delta across the insulation reduces heat loss to the substrate..

..but if you're going for low flow temps you may have to make compromises on your floor covering and ensure that the rest of the house is up to high spec with regards to insulation and air tightness, otherwise fabric losses and draughts are just going to wipe out the low grade background heat supplied by the ASHP, you up the flow temp and then efficiency of the pump suffers and a larger proportion of your paid-for heat soaks into the ground

Need to consider this as a holistic system, not just a heat emitter change
 
Perhaps you could investigate spreader plates for UFH, you could run this from a standard boiler it takes up a lot less depth than insulation and pipes embedded in screed.

Is it as good? not sure, but there others that will advise.
 
Would spreader plates not lose heat up and down? So if the insulation is only 30mm that would not be sufficient?
 
Asking the wrong person I'm afraid, as I've not used them, but I wonder if you could put say 30mm celotex down, then the spreaders?

There are some boffins on here that will know more about what's possible and what's not.

Sorry can't be any more use.
 
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