Heated Floors

That is a huge bathroom 128 feet by 6 feet, wow...............only do where you come in contact, the rest will radiate out.

 

At that price, I won't be throwing my house slippers away anytime soon.

 

I put this in my old house in the basement bathroom. It made the floor nice and toasty, but didn't do much to warm the room. Installation was pretty simple.

 

Our tile guy has installed something similar. No idea of a brand but it was a little more labor intensive than the pre made mats from HD. The stuff he used was heat tape and it was installed into pre-routed channels in a piece of plywood. The wiring ran to a thermostat for radiant heat and was wired by an electrician. No ideas on cost either but the good thing is that it's custom fit.

 

I've done a great deal of research on this product as I was planning to put it in my family room. In the end the negative comments from several different sites won out. Use you have solar, wind or some other way to reduce your electric bill, I'd not advise you to purchase this. In our full bath, I use a standalone electric heater. What a difference. It's plugged into a GFI plug. For $30 it was a steal, and it's lasted now for close to 7 years. https://www.google.com/shopping/pro...f-8&sa=X&ei=mYPdVLDVOsmzggSU94F4&ved=0CHgQuSQ is the link to the unit.


Way cheaper than putting it in your floor. I simply put it on right before I go in the bathroom for my morning routine, and it warms up the small space in no time.

 

That's just it with this electric heat coil. It's to make your feet warm in the bathroom, but really doesn't warm the room, not efficiently at least. But, this is a simple to install and low initial cost way of having warm tile floor.

Now a hydronic boiler fed radiant floor heating system will keep you warm, with no other type of heat source, and do it efficiently. But it will cost a lot more up front.

 

I do not reccomend,you will use lots of electricity for a small amount of heat coming through floor.I am like Boettg33,I have a small electric heater on a cheap inline timer.Heater and radio come on about 15 min. before I am in the room.If you really want warm floors,put in electric radiant ceiling panels,way more eff.,will heat floor better than the electric in floor,cost less to run(and warm the toilet seat,if you can get him to put it back down!)Radiant ceiling panels come as and are finished same as drywall.

 

Yup, of course.

 

I put something very similar in the bath at my last house. I liked it a lot, but I wasn't heating the whole room with it. The product I used was, as mentioned above, more flexible but also more finicky to install: a loose wire, zigzagged back and forth across whatever area I wanted.

I set the thermostat just high enough to make the tile bathroom floor feel about like the hardwood floors in the rest of the house, neither cool nor particularly warm. It wasn't there to provide a "ooooh, nice!" kind of luxurious experience, it was there to prevent the shock of stepping onto a frigid tile floor, and for that it worked very well without pushing up the electric bill too much. We had a rough, rustic tile that, when gently warmed, was very pleasant to stand on in bare feet. We had no bath mat, and didn't want for one.

The floor had its own programmable thermostat, which helped with operating costs. Our floor installation was fairly beefy, with thick tiles on top of a bed of self-leveling compound. When the warming cable switched on it would take quite a while to warm up all that dense material, so it wasn't feasible to manually switch it on and off as needed. The user interface of the thermostat that came with ours was just awful, so I'd recommend reading reviews of and/or trying out the thermostat that goes with whatever product you're considering.

 

You must deal with a different electric radiant ceiling heat then I have, everyone I've ran into the owner had me tear out our just stopped using it due to high electric bill. Buddy of mine just bought a used OWB, switching to it and he will have paid for it in savings over one winter, cut his electric bill from $1000 to $300 or less per month.

WW... One thing I've heard about the electronic in floor HEATERS is that you can't have rugs or leave towels on the floor, for the could cause fires. That would be worst case, have seen of rugs and towels getting burnt/ blackened and being ruined. I think your more looking for a floor WARMER, these products would work good for a warmer application. They both will up your electric bill, fact more electricity through a system the more heat created, so the more heat created the more electricity will be used.

My little brother decided to save a few hundred bucks when we built his new house 2 yrs ago and not put anything like this under his tile in the bathrooms. Having never been around tile he didn't realize how cold it can be. (Also the tight wad has the heat lowered in the basement, not helping the cold floor issue) So now we are going to run pex piping in aluminum transfer plated between the floor joist on the under side of the subfloor, I have been using a lot of systems like this, and using a small inline on demand water heater as a heat source. (Yes I know this is not the intended use of a inline water heater, but it works) the system will have a flow pump, sized to the average flow the water heater is intended for, and will be on a timer system so not to be running all the time. No it's not the best way to do it, but since I'm not gonna rip up his tile floors, this will work.

Just another idea for you.

~Nathan

 

Not trying to bust balls but do you all really spend that much time standing barefoot on a bathroom floor? I don't know about you but I have a nice padded mat in front of the sink, toilet, and outside the shower. Much cheaper than any other way to keep bare feet of the tile. Other than socks, etc...

OHHHH I forgot to mention that I am CHEAP!!!

 

I don't even have mats and my floor's fine. The only time I'm barefoot in there is getting in the shower and one of the added bonuses of wood heat is that it makes objects nice and warm. I just shot the bathroom floor with the temp gun and it read 64, the sink top was 69. Some folks bathrooms are too far from the stove to benefit from stove heat and maybe the heated floor would be a good thing for them, but I would think a wall mounted heater would be a better choice and probably cheaper too.
Ah, I remember the days of the cold toilet seat too, good times, good times.

 

I did not say it would be cheap,just cheaper than using the floor heat,takes a lot more running to keep the floor warm from below.I agree hydronic would be the best,but then you also have another appliance running.Ceiling on a timer,to run part of the time is what I was thinking.Also with the newer in floor electric pads/wires the floor temp is not supposed to get over mid 80's surface temp.,and may be less depending on what is around it.True radiant heat is most efficient with a sealed house,which most of us do not have.

 

Your right these applications are not efficient for heat, but OK for floor warming. I build a lot of shops with in floor hydronic heating, very expensive and not efficient when in tall ceiling applications, but people love a warm floor. Really a bad idea if you power wash in the building a lot, literally washing money down the drain, water absorbs the radiant heat and goes down the drain, takes a long recoup time to heat area back up. I prefer hanging radiant tube heaters, less expensive to install and run.

~Nathan