Engineer to fix underfloor heating in Minergie building

Accomodation, House and Garden
1
Does anyone know where I can find an engineer who understands underfloor heating system of minergie apartment?

My landlord completely ignores all my emails and letters so want to try and get outside support.

My heating does not want to go less than 23 degrees even through all Thermostates are set to zero.

I have access to the pipes but don’t know how the system functions.

Looking in Zürich.

2
As a renter, your landlord is responsible - try a registered letter.

To try and help:

if you have no room thermostats, you should have a box (or boxes) in a wall with various pipes coming in and out with taps on. Each marked with different rooms.

You should be able to adjust the flow to each area from here. Do not close any of these completely...

3
AbFab refers to the manifolds below. They could be behind any little door or lid. Mine are in a corner, behind what would normally be where the head of a bed is:

They look like this:

The number of individual manifolds depends on the number of rooms in that loop of the heating system. In my house's first floor we have 6: 4 bedrooms, the bathroom, and the corridor.

You open and close them with a little key (it normally hangs from a wire where the manifolds are). Turning them clockwise reduces water flow. It works immediately, and as you turn them, you'll see the flow indicator change (it's usually measured in liters/minute):

4
Thanks for this. I managed to find them and turn them. When I turn the bathroom and bedroom the indicator immediately moves.

With the living room the indicator does not move at all - it stays on zero however the living room is still warm. Strange.

5
Two questions:

Do you have room thermostats?

How old is the building?

6
It could be that the manifold is fully opened and there's ANOTHER valve somewhere else in the loop, controlled by the thermostat. If water was flowing earlier (although you mentioned that all thermostats are at "zero", they probably have a range, where the lowest setting is not really "off" but just an acceptable basal temperature), the thermal inertia of the concrete and tiles/parquet will keep the floors warm for a few hours.

7
Building is 2022. There is a thermostat in bedroom and living room.

8
There is another value a black knob with different values 0 and up. I turned it to 0 three days ago. That caused no change.

9
Or the people below are living in a Sauna.

I know people that live on the top floor who have their valves shut throughout the winter.

10

https://share.icloud.com/photos/07d4…RsuXZ66YrHpk-A

Here is a photo

11
It takes a few hours to cool down. But if it was zero before, than something strange is happening.

I suggest to check with your neighbors to see if they suffer from the opposite problem: Thermostat all up, but the floor as cold as ice.

The one to ask first is the one living on the opposite of the wall with the manifold cabinet.

12
That was also my situation in the previous apartment. Since my top floor was newer than the rest, I always assumed the old apartments were so poorly insulated that they were just heating a lot, with the heat coming up to my flat and then staying there...

13

That looks like just a remote-access meter reader, not a valve: https://www.kamstrup.com/en-en/heat-…s/multical-303

14
That can well be. My underfloor heating is almost never on and it is still warm enough. Good insulation and heating neighbours 😄

15
I've reported on this before here but ours was a new build and the thermostats were not wired up so didn't work and some fed the wrong rooms.

The installation engineers refused to accept things were wrong for ages and in the end I had to fault-find it myself and tell them exactly what was wrong and what needed fixing.

16
We had that as well. Four out of five on the upstairs floor of our house were connected up wrongly. The heating engineer had mooted that as a possibility pretty early on and then discounted it as the room we tested was actually the one that was correct.

It took ages to figure it out and it was me who actually did it. When I told them what it was they didn’t believe me until they came and checked it out for themselves.

17
It's worth getting to the bottom of the problem - and I do recommend purchasing some room thermometers and sending a photograph of the actual temperature with a letter complaining their lack of timely response and the fact that you know that it's not acceptable.

Also, as others have said - check with your neighbours below and see if they are having the same problem.

Certainly our apartment was too warm the past few days and we had to go around and turn all our heaters down - it's much warmer (and wetter!) than normal.... and it does take a day or two to adjust, plus opening the windows twice a day for maximum 5-10 minutes to give a good flush of fresh cool clean air....

Neighbours were complaining one heater was not working in one bedroom - landlord sent handyman out to check - he did some cleaning and said it was OK - still no heating - second repairman finally came out - and discovered the first guy had checked the system but then left it turned off at the main connection .... I feel the landlord's pain as it's not their fault! Anyway, heating is now (finally) working....

18
I literally have the exact same setup in my apartment. Also newly constructed in 2022.

There was the same issue that some rooms were too hot, although there are thermostats in every room. Just this week an electrician came by to check the whole apartment block and now it‘s working as intended.

What needs to be done is to set the thermostats to the highest setting for 15 minutes or so to calibrate the system. Otherwise it can „bug“ out leading to fully open valves.

19
So the heating is definitely gone down. The temp is now 22.3 and all the floors are cold.

So my question is now, what setting should I put the pipes on and what setting should I put the thermostat on?

ATM all the thermostats are off and the pipes at 0, the living room pipe and bedroom pipe gauge does not change which I twist the gauge. The bathroom and kitchen gage does move when I twist it.

20
Bathrooms and kitchens tend not to have thermostats - so they can't be turned off completely allowing mould to develop on the damp, cold surfaces.

Adjust the valves in the gauges to give a flow that warms these rooms sufficiently.

Set it on a low late - like 1.5l/min and leave it for a day before making other changes.

If the wall thermostats are off for the other rooms, adjusting the valves on the gauge will make no difference as no water is flowing.

I would set the flow valves to what they were before you fiddled with them (you did make a note of those settings, didn't you?) and set the thermostats to the room temperature you want.

After a day or so, if the temperature is too high, or too low (use a thermometer), adjust the flow valve either up or down and wait another day.

In the end, the ideal set up is that the room temperature matches the setting on the wall thermostat.

Once set, you should rarely need to adjust it.

Even with the heating off, it may take a couple of days or even more for temperatures to drop in a minergie house. Ours isn't and even then if I turn the heating off in winter, the temperature only drops by a degree a day.