Well, it’s been eight years and we’ve never had the opportunity to silence a failed sub-floor that incorporates under floor heating, although we know there’s many out there. That is until now…

Fixing badly failed sub-floors is a technical challenge at the best of times. We’re often dealing with many variables. Now add a fully pressurised under floor heating system and the technicality has just doubled instantly. This put us off and of course our potential clients as they knew what that meant, expense!

Fixing noisy floors ‘properly and permanently’ isn’t cheap in the first place, but add UFH and the cost can spiral. Our first ever project showed us that. It certainly wasn’t easy. It’s not just about lifting the pipes out of the way and being careful not to damage them – although it doesn’t take much imagination to know that that certainly is a challenge in itself – but it’s about gaining access to as many cavities as possible while at the same time making sure that everything we’ve done to fix the issues is going to work. We’re dealing with pretty aggressive temperature changes, zoned heating where each room can be heated separately, and the potential for components under these frequent and rapid close quarters temperature changes to fail. We have to be super careful from start to finish.

Our first project incorporated a 22mm chipboard sub-floor with channels routered into it to seat the under floor heating pipes. Now each channel was approximately 200mm apart and the routering went to a depth of 20mm. Therefore, we were left with an incredibly compromised chipboard sub-floor that we could actually see in parts that had split due to each of the routered channels literally hanging on by a thread. Bare in mind, this type of system should really last the lifetime of the property, and here we were, fixing issues when the property is only three years old.

Here we see Liam in somewhat deep thought, ready to tackle the issues at hand.

You can also see the routered and somewhat flawed heating pipe channels.

Our client was eager to find a solution to this. They’d built their house from scratch and stipulated to their builder that there was to be no squeaking floors. The issues started from the early days of the finished house. Quickly our client realised that their stipulation hadn’t been met. Two attempts to fix them by the builder and three years later, it was time to get SqueakFix in.

I think it took a client that really knew what they wanted and were willing to make it happen for us to be brought in. From our point of view, we’re in the service industry and at the core of our business we want clients to be happy. When we see they’re that keen to have the perfect property, that really makes us sit up and spring into action!

For us, it’s also opened us up to tackling these UFH floors. Our next up coming UFH project will be slightly different. The pipes have been literally clipped to the bottom of the chipboard! I’m sure they’ll be some learning to be done there..

If you’re having issues with a failed floor with an incorporated Under Floor Heating system, get in touch through the form below and lets start the conversation..