Heating the floor from underneath is nothing new. In fact it was the Romans that first made fire under a raised floor and passed the smoke through a labyrinth of tunnels under each floor to heat from below. Under floor heating is now internationally accepted as a system that achieves the best comfort levels. Afripex together with our proprietary software, design a full UFH layout together with complete system specification to ensure complete satisfaction. Using a manifold system see: General: Wirsbo UFH Manifold (231 KB) Heated water is passed through the floor of each room and is controlled by a thermostat to offer room temperature as required. Various heat sources including electric, solar, paraffin and coal boilers are available. Turnkey design is completed using engineering design principles see: General: Basics UFH Manual 2002 (3.16 MB) The system is commissioned by trained and accredited installers and is backed by a 10 year warranty.

The design utilizes insulation to ensure that heat loss from the building is kept to a minimum thereby reducing energy required to maintain building comfort when compared with conventional systems. Not every application lends itself to placing pipes under the floor. This is evident particularly on building that require retro-fitting or buildings that have expensive floor coverings that cannot be limited. In this case we use a more conventional radiator type system. See General: Wirsbo Radiator Heating System (270 KB) Our design software also allows us to use Radiator systems in combination with underfloor heating which provides total design flexibility.

Commercial Underfloor/underslab heating offers engineers more flexibility when designing heated chambers or enclosures. The concept is identical to heating a home but is scaled up in size depending on the commercial requirement. Heating commercial enclosures is excellent for the drying off goods. It offers a uniform temperature over a large area. The system is also “under the skin” of the building which means that access to an area is not restricted and there are no items that can be tampered with during the running of the plant or area that is heated. See: Tech Data Sheet: Meltaway - The perfect solution (146 KB) Under floor heating has no impact of the placing of machinery as it is completely hidden. There are many commercial applications using underfloor heating. Football and Rugby fields can be heated to improve turf quality, prevent frost which allows for better usage. See: Tech Data Sheet: Meltaway Footballfield ref (1.10 MB) Snow can also be melted and is used on Airport runways in many of the world’s airports that are susceptible to cold weather. Some of the more diverse applications can be found in: Tech Data Sheet: Meltaway Leaflet reference (2.28 MB) With all the above applications are covered by our design manual specific to these industrial applications. A closer look at our design manual Tech Data Sheet: Meltaway Manual (565 KB) will provide more ideas.

South Africa is one of the areas globally that has very high solar gain while at the same time having few overcast days during that gain. This means that we can use Solar heating to not only heat our domestic water for showering and bathing but we can use the Solar system as a heat source for Under floor heating. The concept is to use the high solar gain during the daylight hours to heat the building so that when the building is occupied during the night the building structure is warm until the next sunrise. Afripex has completed numerous projects using Solar as a heat source, some will be seen in the project files.