Carpet Over Underfloor Heating – No Nails Please !

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 fitting of carpet over underfloor heating. The use of nails!!!

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 sub-floor.   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 door bars are stuck down for fixing carpet over 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 for both the carpet fitter and the householder.

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