Hi all,
I am just about to start laying oak planks on a suspended wooden floor. At the moment the central heating pipework is attached to the joists, with about 10mm from the pipework to the underside of the flooring planks on top (clipped along the joist, not running across joists). The supplier of the oak planks has told me that this is too close, and the oak planks will suffer from localised heating, leading to eventual warping. I suggested putting Kingspan insulation in the gap, but they weren't happy with that either, saying that the temperature at the underside of the planks mustn't exceed 27degC, and
10mm insulation is unlikely to be sufficient, but they can't tell me how much would be sufficient. Now I can easily lower the pipes and increase the insulation thickness, but how far should I go? Given Kinspan's insulation figures, could I work out the temperature drop in any way?At the same time as doing this job, I am insulating between the joists with 100mm Kingspan, so it makes sense to run the pipework within the Kingspan, rather than dropping the pipework down under the joists, and lagging them separately, but will, say, 50mm of Kingspan be enough to keep the temperature down sufficiently?
Incidentally, I could try an experiment with different thickness of insulation, and measuring the temperature after running the heating for a while, but I'm fitting new radiators at the moment so can't run the system to do this experiment.
thanks,
dan.