Heated floors at Rockingham View in Little Bowden
New houses such as those at Rockingham View on Windy Ridge are commonly designed with underfloor heating on the ground floor, and the screed is what turns those pipes into a working heated floor. That layer carries the warmth across the room, shields the pipework and leaves a flat surface for the flooring. Getting it wrong shows up later as cold patches, cracks or a floor that takes an age to warm. Pipe cover is the first check. Liquid screed wants 25mm or more above the pipes, so the whole floor usually ends up 45 to 50mm thick. With sand and cement the cover is around 45mm. Skimp on it and cracks can follow the pipe lines; overdo it and the room is slow to warm. Liquid screed has an advantage here because it flows fully around the pipes with no air pockets, so heat passes into the floor evenly and warm-up is quicker. That is why it is usually the specification on new estates. Many housing plots name a calcium sulphate product, and the anhydrite screed page for Market Harborough covers grades, laitance and moisture testing in more detail. On a new build, the date the screed is poured sets the date the heating can be commissioned, which in turn affects when flooring can go down and the house can be handed over. We plan the pour with that sequence in mind.
Retrofitting heating in older Market Harborough homes
Semi-detached houses make up 31% of Market Harborough's homes, and an older semi can take underfloor heating as part of a kitchen extension or a ground floor renovation. The difficulty is height. An existing floor has fixed doorways, skirting and thresholds, so there is only so much room for insulation, pipes and screed. A thinner liquid screed often helps where every millimetre counts. Heated extensions and garden rooms follow the same rules as a whole house, just on a smaller scale. The insulation, membrane and edge strip are checked before the pour, and the edge strip matters more than people expect, because it lets a heated floor expand without cracking against the walls. The heating then goes on gradually. Calcium sulphate floors can normally be warmed after roughly 7 days, but sand and cement needs a minimum of 21 days. Even then the temperature creeps up in stages across several days. For the drying side of that, read how long screed takes to dry. Desborough is about 5 miles away; see underfloor heating screed in Desborough.
Underfloor Heating Screed prices in Market Harborough
Liquid screed over underfloor heating: £20 to £35 per m² supplied and laid (trade2base, June 2026), so £700 to £1,230 for 35 m². trade2base gives these figures excluding VAT. See our floor screeding cost guide or screed calculator.
Who lays your underfloor heating screed in Market Harborough
K & B Screeding’s own team, led by director Donatas Bardisevicius. Founded 2019, company 12298780.
See what customers say in our Google reviews and on our testimonials page.
Underfloor Heating Screed from Slough to Market Harborough
Market Harborough is about 66.6 miles north of our Slough base as the crow flies, with postcodes including LE16. The nearest towns to it are Desborough (5 miles), Corby (9.4 miles), Kettering (9.9 miles) and Lutterworth (11.8 miles).
More on underfloor heating screed, part of our screeding services.