A couple of months ago I told you about a carpet fitter who used the wrong type of underlay with underfloor heating.  Last week I saw another problem with the carpet fitting at a house with underfloor heating.

We were fitting a lovely Karndean floor to the kitchen, utility and family room.  As part of this job we had to take up the old door bars and replace them.  When I uplifted the carpets in the door ways, I noticed that both the door bars and the gripper had been nailed into the subfloor.   Where there is underfloor heating nothing should be nailed into the floor as these nails can go through the underfloor heating pipes.  A good carpet fitter should stick the gripper rods and also the door bars.  Some carpet fitters don’t do this because cutting gripper into small lengths sticking it and waiting for it to stick takes more time than nailing the 5′ lengths direct to the sub-floor.

Luckily for this customer the nails from the gripper rods and door bars does not seem to have penetrated the underfloor heating pipes.  However I would always recommend that gripper and doorbars are stuck down where there is underfloor heating or any kind of piping sunk into the sub-floor.  It takes slightly more time for the carpet fitter but a bust pipe in the sub-floor would result in an lot of mess and expense.