Solar heating was always the intended way of heating this building. Whilst this ideally would be from a heat store below the floor, it was clear that this wouldn’t happen this time round. As an alternative, a solar water heated concrete floor was eventually decided on.

The floor is to be floated on a 50mm layer of polystyrene insulation sat on a polythene membrane. Water heating of the 75mm thick concrete raft is achieved by serpentining 50m of 10mm plastic sheathed copper microbore tubing.

The floor was dug out to a depth of 50mm, and evened. This was exiting work…

On to this was layed the polythene sheet:

 The insulation is 50mm polystyrene blocks made by Dow

First a bedding layer of concrete, then 44m of pvc covered 10mm copper tube, and another layer of concrete.

It doesn’t get anymore exiting than this.

See…