Two quotes, word-for-word alike. One of them is the cold house.
Two quotes are lying on a kitchen table in Perth tonight, and they say the same thing: pipe, a heat pump, one manifold, a price. One of them is the warm house. The other is the system that gets switched off in year two. Nothing printed on either page says which is which – the difference is in work neither quote mentions. One family will pay about $240 a month to be warm this winter. The other about $601, in the same rooms.
$240 and $601 are modelled estimates for a 200 m² home, a month through winter. The calculator is free and takes a minute – from the Perth engineers who design these systems and install them with our own team.
Pipe loops laid and pressure-tested before the pour. Days after this photo, the concrete goes in – and everything in it is permanent.
Here's what you'd be choosing between.
Two families build the same house in Perth this year. Same plan, same builder, same winter coming. Neither family knows yet which one they are – nothing on the pages they signed can tell them, and one of them may never get the rooms warm at all. That is the problem this page exists to fix.
Below are the two specs, written the way they'd actually appear on a quote. Read them. Pick the one you'd rather live with.
- 200m² home
- PE-RT pipe, laid in the floor
- 1 heat pump, 1 manifold zone
- Screed poured, tiles down
- Ready for winter
- 200m² home
- PE-RT pipe, laid in the floor
- 1 heat pump, 1 manifold zone
- Screed poured, tiles down
- Ready for winter
There's no way to tell from here. That's the whole problem.
Whichever one you picked, you picked at random – because the two specs are word-for-word identical. So did both families. That's not a trick of this page. It's a fair copy of what most floor heating quotes look like – pipe (PE-RT is simply a common plastic heating pipe), a heat pump, a zone, a price. None of it tells you what the system was calculated to do.
The pipe is the cheap part. Any licensed installer can lay it. What decides whether your floor runs at $240 a month or $601 a month happens before the pipe goes down, in work that never appears on a quote:
- the heat-load calculation – how much heat each room loses on the coldest night
- the slab and screed detailing
- where the thermal breaks go
- how the heat pump is sized and sited
Skip that work and the slab still gets poured, the pipe still gets warm, the floor still feels fine on the first evening. The two families stay identical for about eighteen months. Then one of them starts reading the bill twice.
Pipe in an uninsulated slab vs engineered to The 37-Point Design
| The cheap quote | Euroheat | |
|---|---|---|
| What gets calculated | Pipe spacing to fill the floor. Nothing else. | Heat load room by room, system sized to the actual demand. |
| The slab and screed | Often no thermal break and no insulation under the pipe – in the worst cases, up to 70% of the heat lost down and sideways. | Insulated screed, detailed so heat goes up, into the room. |
| Thermal bridges | Not checked. One ignored bridge can double or triple the bill on its own. | Found and broken before the pour. |
| Heat pump | Wherever it fits on site, often boxed in – up to 50% efficiency lost. | Sized to the load, sited to breathe, designed in early. |
| Zoning and controls | One zone, factory default settings. | Zoned to how you live, commissioned and tuned to your slab's measured heat-up time. |
| Running cost | ~$601/mo, modelled. Sometimes dearer than the aircon you're leaving. | ~$240/mo, modelled. The reason you wanted hydronic. |
| If it underperforms | Your problem. The pipe's already in the concrete. | Our problem. Every room to temperature or we fix it at our cost. |
| Servicing, later | Rip up the floor, or live with it. | Balanced and serviced without ever breaking the slab. |
| What you're actually buying | Pipe and labour. Nothing calculated. | A calculation, backed by a guarantee. |
Terms on this page. Heat load: how much heat each room loses on the coldest night, and so how much it needs. Screed: the layer of concrete-like topping the heating pipes are buried in, poured over the main slab. Thermal break: a strip of insulation that stops the warm slab touching anything cold – the slab edge, a path, an alfresco. Heat-up time: how long your slab takes to warm.
Got a quote in front of you? Run it through the decoder.
Tick which of the eight engineering items your quote actually includes, in writing – and see what each missing one typically costs a home your size. Free, 2 minutes, modelled estimates.
The gap, in dollars
Walk both families forward to July 2031 – same 200 square metres each, same 4-degree night. One turns the floor on in May and doesn't think about it again until spring. The other has stopped turning it on. Here is what separates them, at today's Perth rates.
Modelled estimate, not a promise: a 200 m² home, per month of the five-month Perth heating season (May–September), at Synergy's A1 rate of 33.26 c/kWh (July 2026), held flat for 20 years. The two families are composites of the quotes we see every winter; the figures are our model, not their bills. Run your own home's numbers in the calculator below.
"...it was more cost effective than using other companies selling standardized heat pumps, floor heating and air conditioning units."
Wondering why an engineered quote costs more up front? The straight answer is in the FAQ →
Pipe laid, before the pour. Whatever was calculated before this moment decides a house's heating bills for thirty years – and whatever wasn't, can never be added.
The real cost of the cheap system isn't the bill. It's abandonment.
Follow the second family to their third winter. They ran the floor heating every day of the first one, weekends of the second, mornings only after that. Some time in August the switch stays off, and nobody in the house says anything about it.
Nobody rips up a floor to fix a heating system. The pipe is in the concrete and the mistakes are in the structure, so fixing it properly means rebuilding the house. So the aircon goes back on – the one they built the house to get away from – and they tell people for years that floor heating is a waste of money. It wasn't. The system was. Nobody told them there was a difference.
A tens-of-thousands-of-dollars system, written off and switched off. The most expensive heater nobody uses.
a pipe is laid
Engineered right the first time. Because there is no second time.
A standard installation covers the physical steps – laying the pipe, connecting the manifold, fitting a heat source, pressure-testing – not the engineering that makes those steps count. Our design process runs 37 checks before a pipe is laid: heat load per room, system sizing, slab and screed detailing, thermal breaks at every junction, heat pump siting, controls tuned to your slab's measured heat-up time. It's the difference between pipe in concrete and a heating system that actually does what hydronic is supposed to do.
We've designed and built these systems in WA since 1992. We're engineers who design every millimetre, install it ourselves, and stand behind it.
Warm every winter, for as long as you own the home – guaranteed on every part we control.
- Warm, and it stays warm. Every room reaches and holds the temperature we designed it for, through Perth's coldest mornings. If it doesn't, we fix it at our cost.
- Warm without a wrecked floor later. The system can be serviced and rebalanced for decades without a jackhammer touching your slab.
- Warm because the design was right – and if it wasn't, that's on us. If the system underperforms because of our engineering, we correct it at our cost, build consequences included.
- You'll know the running cost before you decide. We model it and show you the number up front, and hold to that model under the conditions we state. We never promise a dollar figure – but we do guarantee the design that keeps it low.
This is a guarantee only the engineer who designed the system can make. No design, no guarantee. That's the actual difference between System 1 and System 2 – one of them comes with someone standing behind the calculation, and one doesn't.
Existing home, and floor heating would mean a new slab you don't want to pour?
Radiators: the same quiet, even warmth, from the walls →Architect or builder speccing this for a client's project?
See the trade page →Both families are still deciding. So are you.
The two houses on this page are a model. Yours is its own calculation, not a generic spec sheet – put in your size and a few details you already know, and see your own two numbers in writing. Then, when you want to make sure which winter you end up in, that's what The Comfort Guarantee Roadmap is for.