How Infloor Heating Works

Imagine waking up on an icy winter morning, dragging your feet out of bed... and hitting a toasty warm hardwood floor. Then, you head into the bathroom.. and your feet hit a comfy, blanketed tile floor. With infloor heating, it's possible!

Infloor heating, also known as radiant floor heating, uses either electric wires or hot-water tubing underneath your floors to warm not just the floor, but to create radiant heat for the whole room. The room temperature, since heat is coming from the bottom up, stays more constant. Forced air heating shoots hot air to the ceiling, where it loses heat as it drops lower in the room. Radiant heat actually warms up whatever it touches, so your furniture, rugs and anything else touching the floor will absorb and radiate the warmth throughout the room.

Whole House Radiant Floor Heat Systems

The most cost effective way to heat your whole house with radiant heat is to use a hydronic, or hot water, system. Ancient Romans warmed their floors with infloor heating pipes circulating hot water, and it has been used throughout Europe since the 1970s. Also, if you are building a new house, this is also easier since with an existing house you would have to rip up the entire floor.

A hydronic system costs more at the outset than a forced-air system, but it is much more efficient. This system will last you around 40 years of use, where a standard furnace will conk out between 10 and 25 years. You can also use various equipment to heat the water, such as a oil or gas boiler, or a gas, kerosene or solar water heater. If you have a smaller home, you may even be able to use your regular water heater.

Electric Floor Heating

This type of radiant floor heating involves electrical coils encased in a heat-conducting plastic mat. The coils are copper or nichrome resistance wires wrapped in water resistant polymer. Because this uses electricity, it tends to be more expensive to use than hydronic systems. For that reason, an electric system is better to use in single rooms, such as bathrooms, mudrooms or kitchens. You don't want to heat your entire house this way.

You can use it with almost any type of flooring, even wood, but the best effect is with tile floors. You'll get either a switch to turn the heating on or off, or a thermostat that you can program. It doesn't take long for the floors to heat up, and a programmable thermostat lets you set them to turn on 30 minutes or an hour before you wake up, for example. You can install this sort of radiant heating yourself, although you will need to remove your existing floor before you can lay the mats down. Then, you simply install new tile overtop.

No matter which type of infloor heating you choose, you will love both the comfort and the ease of use... not to mention the overall savings in energy!