Russell White started EkoBuild in 2001 after he ripped his own radiators out and proved electric underfloor heating could carry an entire UK home. 25 years and 100+ installations later, he is still the one answering the phone.
Russell White is not a marketer. He is a builder, an electrical engineer, and the kind of person who fixes things by taking them apart and rebuilding them properly. EkoBuild started because he could not buy what he wanted, so he had to source it.
In the late 1990s, Russell built his own eco house in North Wales. Triple-glazed, super-insulated, designed to need almost no heating. The problem: every electric underfloor heating system on the UK market was a cable system rated for "supplementary" heating only. None of them could carry the load if you ripped the radiators out.
Russell tracked the spec he needed back to Japan, to a company called AHT making amorphous metal ribbon heating. The ribbon design fits 300% more heating elements into the same square metre as a cable, runs cooler, and crucially, is certified for primary heating. He bought enough for his house, installed it under tile, vinyl, and engineered wood, and ran it through a Welsh winter.
It worked. He has not had a radiator in his house since 2001.
Word got out. Friends asked him to do their bathrooms. Their friends asked about kitchens. By 2003, Russell had become the sole UK importer of AHT ribbon and EkoBuild had stopped being a side project. The company has stayed small on purpose, Russell still spec's every system personally, and most customers end up on the phone with him directly.
Gas boilers and radiators are a 1960s solution to a 2026 problem. The UK is electrifying. Heat pumps make sense for some homes, but they are expensive and they need very good insulation to work. Electric underfloor heating, done properly with ribbon technology, is the gap. Cheap to install, cheap to run when paired with solar or off-peak tariffs, and quietly more efficient than anything else for the rooms most people actually want warm.
Russell's pitch is simple: ditch the radiators. Heat the floor instead. The technology is here. He has been proving it since the year Tony Blair was Prime Minister.
25 years of running EkoBuild has produced some specific, measurable results. These are not marketing numbers, they are what the business has actually done.
Every EkoBuild system runs on the same core technology: a flat metal ribbon woven into a thin flexible mesh. It is the reason our systems can act as primary heating where cable systems cannot.
Standard heating cables use crystalline metal alloys. The crystal structure means heat is generated along narrow paths, like a single thin wire glowing red. Amorphous metal has no crystalline structure: heat is generated evenly across the full ribbon width. That means lower surface temperatures and far more even heat distribution.
In a cable system, the heating element occupies maybe 15% of the floor area covered by the system. In a ribbon system, the element occupies closer to 60%. More element per square metre means more even heating and the ability to run the system cooler while still meeting the watts-per-m² needed for primary heat.
Total Ribbon thickness is 1.8mm. It rolls out on top of an insulation layer (Therm-All), our high-tech tape keeps it in place, and your floor finish goes over the top. No screed, no waiting weeks for things to dry. For a renovation, this is the difference between needing to lift doors and skirting versus not needing to.
EkoBuild has stayed small on purpose. Russell is the one specifying your system. That means a few promises we can keep:
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