When you are installing a wood, laminate or vinyl floor, it is easy to forget some of the ancillaries that add the professional finished look to your project, but these can make all the difference to the overall appearance and performance.

Everyone remembers to buy the actual flooring – but you may also need underlays, scotia door bars or threshold strips, adhesives, silicones and, the product that most people miss, radiator pipe covers. Purchasing all the materials before you start your project makes it so much easier to install and also ensures the best colour match.

Radiator pipe covers or rings can be put into place after the project has finished either by your flooring installer or even fitted by the end user as they do not need any specialist knowledge or tools to fit them.

Fitting Flooring Around Pipes

When you lay your flooring, you will need to drill a hole that is slightly larger than the radiator pipe. This should be around 5mm wider than the pipe as most floor types are floating floors which can move when you have differences in temperature and humidity. If there is no expansion gap left you risk the flooring damaging the pipe and potentially creating a leak, which you want to avoid.

A V-shape cut also needs to be added to this hole so you can slide the panel towards the wall without hitting the pipe. The V-shape piece is then put into place behind the pipe, but the piece will always be smaller as the cutting tool will have a blade and the cut will be less than the thickness of the blade on each side. This could be as much as 8mm in total that is missing.

Pipe roses or radiator pipe covers are the ideal solution to hide the expansion gap around the pipe and also the potentially unsightly ill-fitting replacement piece that hides the gap from the pipe to the skirting board.

Once the plank is in place, we recommend that you use the correct silicone sealant to fill the gap around the pipes making sure that the silicone is level with the plank. This will give a flat bed for you to then affix the pipe roses in place. We would recommend that you let the sealant dry for at least 48 hours before you finish the job off with the pipe covers.

Types of Radiator Pipe Rose Covers

Radiator pipe roses come in various styles and colours. There are different materials and if you are laying wood flooring you may want to use a matching solid wood rose cover.

There are also vinyl self-adhesive and plastic pipe rose covers that come in mostly silver and white and some other colours like greys and beiges, which may give you the appearance you want, although they can look synthetic against a natural wood floor.

At All-in-All Flooring Accessories we manufacture two types of covers. The most popular is the solid oak collection, available in 14 colours to match our solid and engineered wood door bars and nosing ranges. We stain these in our manufacturing warehouse and for extra protection we then add a lacquered protective coat which gives a slight sheen to match your existing floor type.  There is also an unfinished cover for you to stain to match your flooring if needed.

These pipe roses are circular with a 17mm hole drilled out which is a standard UK water pipe size. To get the rings to fit around the pipes they are laser cut into two halves with a jigsaw joint to stop them from coming apart. You carefully pull these apart, fit them into position and then put them back together again.

We also produce laminated pipe roses, made using a photograph of wood flooring added onto a self-adhesive vinyl ring. These come in 19 colours to get the closest match to your laminate flooring. The hole is cut at 15mm which fits snugly against the radiator pipes. You should still use a flooring silicone to raise the height of the drill hole, so your new pipe roses lay flat against the floor. There is a split in the radius of the rose so you can manipulate the roses around the central heating pipework.

Before you fix these into place make sure that the pipes are not too close to the skirting board. If they are you can use a pair of scissors to make a neat cut sand the flat edge of the cut can go against the skirting. If the pipe is not close to the wall, then you will need to thoroughly clean the surface area of the flooring, affix the roses by peeling away the paper on the sticky side and apply your rose with some slight pressure. Do not move the pipe covers as it takes at least 30 minutes for the adhesive to set.