Boatman’s House was a former 6 storey office building located right on the waterfront of Canary Wharf. The project involved removing the entire facade, adding two new floors and then bringing the entire building up to current regulations, whilst giving it a modern look.

This is the largest electric underfloor heating project to date with almost 4,000m2 of EUFH installed providing 102 apartment apartments with a bespoke designed system. We worked with the main contractor and attended the site prior to instruction to build a working prototype of our system, this came in handy heating the office site during the cold winter months!

We supplied a whole heating and flooring package, saving the client from dealing with multiple contractors and enabling us to install a variety of products and two uniquely designed heating across 8 floors.

The Challenges

We were faced with a number of challenges, which we were able to overcome thanks to our experience with multi-residential developments. The first was the building itself, the existing area of concrete slabs was uneven from remedial works to make the building suitable for apartments so we utilised the Cellecta acoustic levelling cradle system to give us a level deck to lay our EUFH mat system on top of.

The second major challenge was the electrical supply to the site. A typical mat system would not be suitable in all areas so we worked closely with the electrical contractor to ensure we could meet the heat losses of all areas without exceeding the imposed wattage limits. We used a range of between 80-200Wm2 electrical mats and our in-screed cables on the ground floor to achieve this.

Thirdly, due to uneven levels on the ground floor, we couldn’t install the 75mm sand cement screed that we’d had delivered, however thanks to quick thinking by our install team we added a Rentanol additive to the screed which allowed us to provide the same finished structural level by reducing the overall level of the screed.

The well-documented materials shortage took effect whilst working at Boatsman’s House, however thanks to our stock levels, utilising our warehouse storage using our own delivery fleet we were able to keep disruption to a minimum and deliver a cost-effective, super-efficient electric underfloor heating system for this beautiful new development.