What happens if something goes wrong with my floor heating?
The short answer
Most faults in a hydronic floor heating system happen in the parts you can see and reach: the heat pump or boiler, the circulating pump, a thermostat, a valve at the manifold, or a slow drop in the system’s water pressure. Those get fixed like any appliance, without touching the floor. The pipe in the floor only leaks if something cuts or punctures it, and it’s pressure-tested before it’s covered. The problems that can’t simply be fixed are design problems built into the floor, which is why who designed and built the system matters more than any part.
This question sits behind a lot of hesitation about floor heating. A heater you can see is easy to fix or replace, while a heater buried in concrete sounds like a problem you could never get at. The reassuring part is that very little of a hydronic system is actually in the floor, and the part that is has no moving parts at all.
What usually goes wrong?
Almost everything that can wear or break sits above the floor. The heat pump is a machine with a compressor and a fan, much like the outdoor unit of an air conditioner, and like any machine it can develop a fault. The circulating pump that pushes the water round, the thermostats on the walls, the valves at the manifold and the controller all sit where a technician can reach them, and each can be repaired or swapped without lifting a tile.
The other common one is the water itself. A hydronic system is a sealed loop kept under a little pressure. In the first year or two, small air bubbles work their way out through automatic vents and a fill valve tops the water back up, and then things settle. If the pressure slowly drops later on, or air gets in, the water stops flowing properly and a room goes cool. That’s why we recommend a check about every two years, as our article on what maintenance hydronic heating needs explains: it keeps the heat pump at its best and catches a pressure drop before you’d notice it.
Radiators are the same story. A radiator has no moving parts at all, which is why it’s silent. When one gurgles, ticks or stays cool at the top, it usually means air in the system or a flow problem, so the fix is in the plumbing rather than the panel.
What if a pipe in the floor leaks?
It’s one of the first fears people raise, and the honest answer is that it’s rare and it isn’t a disaster. Floor heating pipe doesn’t burst or wear through on its own. It leaks when something cuts or punctures it, such as a drill, a nail or a saw, and nearly always that happens during the build. That’s why the pipes are pressure-tested before any concrete goes over them and kept under pressure while the house goes up.
If another trade does hit one, water squirts out straight away and the pipe is repaired before the floor is finished, and good pipe makers stand behind that repair even once it’s covered in concrete again. The weak point of any pipe system is its joins rather than the pipe, which is why we choose a pipe maker for the quality of its joins.
After the build, the one thing to avoid is drilling into a heated floor without knowing where the pipes run, so keep the pipe layout drawings with the house papers. Our article on whether floor heating pipes can leak covers the rest.
The problems that can’t simply be fixed
Some faults aren’t breakdowns at all. The system runs and the floor gets warm, yet a back room never quite gets there, or the first winter’s power bill is far higher than anyone said it would be. Those are usually design problems: no insulation under the pipes, so the heat goes into the ground; a heated slab joined to the alfresco slab outside; too little pipe in a room with a wall of glass; a heat pump boxed into a side passage.
Built that way, a 200 m² floor can cost about $601 a winter month to run instead of $240 (modelled estimates), and nothing you can see will tell you why. Some of it can be improved. A heat pump can be moved somewhere it can breathe, the controls reprogrammed, the water temperature brought down. What’s cast into the concrete is permanent.
Phil once took a call from a structural engineer whose project, done with another installer, had cracked right through the house, with steps between sections of screed and hollow, drummy patches underfoot. Phil had to tell him it couldn’t really be fixed without pulling up the whole floor.
With radiator systems, Phil says the call comes almost every week: “Help, someone’s put this system in. It doesn’t do what they promised. Can you help us fix it?” A lot of the time it can be fixed, he says, but it costs a lot of money. That’s the quiet truth about floor heating in particular: a system designed wrong can’t be repaired, only switched off or ripped out. It’s why the design, done before the pour, matters more than any part you can buy.
Who do I call, and what’s covered?
Start with whoever designed and installed the system, and this is where it matters whether that was one company or several. Phil tells the story of a beach house at Eagle Bay where an engineer designed a geothermal system, one plumber laid the floor heating, another did the hot water, and another company installed the heat pump. It sort of worked.
When the owner and builder asked for help, the floor heating plumber pointed at the heat pump company, the heat pump company blamed the hot water, and the hot water plumber pointed somewhere else again. Nobody understood the whole system. Euroheat sent an engineer, a technician and an electrician, and between them they had it working on the day.
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Each part of a system carries its maker’s warranty, and the workmanship is covered separately; ours is a 5-year workmanship warranty on every installation. On systems we design and build there’s also The Comfort Guarantee: every room reaches and holds the temperature we designed it for, through Perth’s coldest mornings, and if it doesn’t, we fix it at our cost. It also covers being able to service and rebalance the system for decades without a jackhammer touching your slab.
If someone else installed your system, we can still look at it. We service systems we didn’t install, depending on the system and its condition, once we’ve checked what’s there and whether parts are available. For homes down south, a connected system lets us see what’s wrong before we drive down, so the right parts come with us and the job gets done in one trip.
Other questions people ask us
Can floor heating pipes burst?
Not on their own. Quality floor heating pipe is rated for 50 years under its standard’s test conditions, and at floor-heating temperatures it outlasts most houses. Pipes leak when something cuts or punctures them, which is why they’re pressure-tested and kept under pressure during the build.
Why is one room colder than the rest?
Usually something simple: air in that loop, a valve at the manifold turned down or stuck, or a thermostat measuring the wrong place. If none of those is it, the room may have more glass or less pipe than it needed, and that’s a design question rather than a fault.
Why is my power bill higher than I expected?
Check the timer and the settings first, because a system left running around the clock, or pushed to a high water temperature, costs more. If those are right, look at how the floor was built. The Running Cost Calculator shows what a well-built floor of your size should cost to run, as a modelled estimate, so you can see how far off yours is.
Is a noisy heat pump a fault?
Not necessarily. Phil compares a good heat pump to a fridge running and a cheap one to a postie bike doing a burnout. A noise that’s new, or a unit that has started to rattle, is worth a service call. See how loud a heat pump should be.
Where to go from here
If you’re in Perth or the south-west and have a system that isn’t doing what it should, the 5-minute quote has a choice for a service or repair (under “Something else”), and that’s the quickest way to tell us what’s happening. If you’re still planning a new home, our free guide to the five floor heating mistakes covers the faults that can’t be fixed once the slab is poured, and the 5-minute quote gives you your options in writing within 3 working days, each with its price and a modelled running cost.