Are you considering a wood stove while your home has underfloor heating? On this page, you’ll read whether a wood stove works well alongside underfloor heating and whether it’s possible to connect a wood stove directly to your underfloor heating system.
Underfloor heating is an excellent base for heating your home. It provides a constant, pleasant warmth and, in modern, well insulated houses, it usually offers enough output to bring rooms up to temperature. Many modern underfloor heating systems also include a cooling function for warm summer days.
In less well insulated homes, however, underfloor heating can sometimes fall short especially when it’s connected to a heat pump. And then there’s something else you may miss: the atmosphere of a real fire. In those situations, a wood stove can be the perfect addition.
The good news is that a wood stove combines perfectly with underfloor heating. Underfloor heating gives you a comfortable baseline, and when you want extra warmth, you simply add a fire.
We recommend contacting your underfloor heating supplier first, because every situation is different. Also pay close attention to how your thermostat responds when you start using the wood stove. In most cases, the underfloor heating will switch off once the room temperature rises above the set point, and switch back on when the temperature drops again. In practice, we often see people use the wood stove in the evening, meaning the underfloor heating is temporarily off. At night, when the fire has gone out, the underfloor heating takes over again.
While it is technically possible to connect a wood stove to an underfloor heating system, we do not recommend it. Underfloor heating works with a low, steady temperature usually between 30 and 40°C and responds slowly to changes. A wood stove, on the other hand, produces a lot of heat quickly and reaches much higher temperatures. These systems simply don’t match well. Even with a boiler stove (water bearing wood stove), connecting it to underfloor heating can lead to less optimal combustion.