Which system is right
— and how we decide
Hydronic (water) floor heating
— warm floors, whole house
Warm water circulates through pipes in the floor and the floor itself becomes the heater — no wall units, no fan noise. A heat pump drives it, moving roughly three to four units of heat for every unit of electricity it draws, against a room heater’s one-for-one. Across a whole house, run all winter, that gap is the entire argument.
We build the full system on European components and don’t mix: Danfoss PEX-A pipe with an oxygen barrier and a stainless-steel manifold throughout, driven by a Copeland heat pump rated to run down to 0°C ambient — which covers Kathmandu’s winter comfortably. For colder sites we supply units rated to −15°C.
Plan the programme around lead time: material arrival runs 2–3 months, installation another 2–6 weeks depending on size. We size the system to the building and lay it with the civil team, and we run an annual maintenance contract to keep it right.
Electric floor heating
— for the rooms and the retrofits
Electric heating cable sits under the floor and warms a single room. It costs more per unit of heat than hydronic, so it’s the wrong tool for a whole premium house — but the right one for a bathroom, a dressing room, or any room in a house already built.
Two real advantages over hydronic: control and warranty. You can run one thermostat per room, or a smart hub with app control managing every room independently — finer zoning than hydronic’s larger loops. We install Danfoss cable and warrant it for 10 years. It preheats over the first day or two, then settles to around 10–12 hours a day in normal use.
Domestic hot water
A heat-pump water heater works on the same principle as the floor — moving heat rather than making it. Against a standard electric geyser running at a COP of 1, our Copeland heat-pump system runs at around 3.5, so over a year the running cost is a fraction, without the recovery wait when three bathrooms want hot water at once. For a premium home of four to five people we’d typically size a 500-litre system, and scale up from there.
Insulation
Heating an uninsulated building is heating the outside. We supply and install insulation — Aerolam and Supreme — across roofs, walls, and floors, and every floor-heating job includes the XPS board under the heat, so it warms the room and not the slab below.
The same work matters even more at scale, which is why we insulate hotels, mountain lodges, and commercial buildings where the running-cost saving is largest. Home or project, the conversation is the same one.
Building a pool too?
