You wake in the middle of a winter slumber, leaving your warm and cozy blanket, you enter your bathroom. Your bare feet hit the bathroom floor and… YIKES!! THAT TILE IS COLD! With a shock like that, who needs coffee?  Luckily, here at K-Wood LLC, we care about you and your feet and have a solution to this problem – an in-floor radiant heat system!

What does In-Floor Radiant Heat do?

In-floor radiant heat keeps your floor warm. This not only prevents that horrendous shock when your bare foot touches tile. But it also helps keep you warm. Since heat rises, the warm floor will heat your room from the bottom up. It can even heat your house, provided there’s enough floors with infloor radiant heat. And because you’re using the entire floor to heat the room, it creates a very even heat. And unlike forced hot air, it won’t make the air seem dry. Infloor radiant heat is especially useful if you have a geothermal system. Geothermal can’t get hot enough to work with baseboard radiant heat, but it is great with in-floor radiant heat.

How it works:

The in-floor radiant heat system that we use is not the “DIY” electric heating pad. We use tubing in your floor that utilizes your heating system’s hot water. One of the best aspects of this system is that the tubing will last longer than your floor. The tubing will not burn out, and you will have more even heat than electric. Plus, it can be heated using your boiler or, heated using your geothermal system.

The system uses thermostats to keep the floor warm. A central manifold utilizes electric valves to precisely control the flow of water to the floor. This ensures that you floor is warm, not hot. A large floor will have multiple zones. This is done to prevent the water from getting too cold. If a loop is too long, it can lead to a cold section of the floor. This is where experience and expertise comes into play.

Applications for In-Floor Radiant Heating:

If you are pouring a wet bed, the tubing can be zip tied directly to the wire mesh that will already be in place.

Installing hardwood floors? No problem.  We use Viega wood panels that are screwed down to the subfloor. Then the tubing is hammered into the a track in the panels. Your wood flooring is laid down as if the in- floor radiant heat wasn’t there. Well, except for the cozy warm feeling.

We can also install the tubing underneath the subfloor. This is via an aluminum panel that is screwed to the underside of the subfloor. This aluminum panel not only supports the tubing, but reflects heat onto the flooring. This is a great method if your flooring has height restrictions, or your flooring is already down. But it does require access to the bottom of the subfloor. So this method only makes sense for the first floor with an unfinished basement.