radiant heat flooring?

destinationAZ

We have a storage area with plain concrete flooring that we are considering turning into an office. A suggestion was made to consider radiant heating in the flooring to keep the space warm. Does anyone have this? does it keep the whole space warm or just the floor? Any pros/cons?

chubbybunny

We have this in one of our bathrooms. It's a small room, so it did keep things warm.

But, just be aware that if anything happens to even a small section of it, the whole thing has to be replaced (at least in my case). We had to get a small section of our bathroom retiled and the tile person nicked the wire, and the whole thing is now useless. That probably is less likely to happen in an office-type setting though, so in that case, I bet it would be a good choice.

carlab44

We have hydronic radiant floor heat for our entire house (except our basement) and love it. But if you're talking about putting something over an existing concrete slab I'm assuming you're looking at those electric radiant heat floor mats?

The issue with putting them over a concrete slab is they will likely put a lot of energy into heating up the concrete slab (and the soil below the slab) before heating the flooring above. You could put down some sort of insulation barrier between the concrete and the radiant heat mat, but even then I wouldn't expect it to really heat up the floors greatly, much less the whole room. I'd probably look into radiant wall heaters instead.

babygirlpriest

We have heated floors in our master bath. Not sure if this is the same thing you're taking about. Ours is set on a timer so only actually on for maybe 6 hours a day and the room is pretty big, but no, it doesn't come close to actually heating the room.

I will say the install is really, really easy. However, like pp said, one little problem anywhere and the whole thing needs to be replaced. Also, if you do the rolled out mats like we did, the heat does NOT spread. The mat stops 1-2 inches from the edge of our bathroom cabinets and every stinking morning my heels are nice and toasty and my toes are freezing.

queenbone

That might have been me.  If you are doing electric radiant floor pads for smaller sized rooms, like bathrooms, there are two options: standard sizes which might leave you with cold spots, or you could have custom pads made to fit the room exactly and fit around your fixtures, cabinets, etc. The standard ones are obviously less expensive.

We installed standard and custom ones in many, many bathrooms and to my knowledge all our clients were happy with them. My mom's best friends have had radiant flooring in their sauna room for over 25 years.

Since we have a similar situation in our new house, a basement rec room with linoleum tiles over concrete with suspicious asbestos mastic underneath I thought I'd call to get some more info.

For anything over 200 sf they recommend using hydronic coils rather than the electric pads. They do use a reflective insulating board as underlayment to direct the heat up so you aren't wasting energy heating up the slab.

You have me all excited to get going on our basement flooring, but I know we won't have any money for that for a while!