Radiant Floor Heat Provides Tiptoe Comfort

Your partner got up in the middle of the night and right away those cold toes are occupying your personal space with the persistency of a heat-seeking missile. Fortuitous for you, the new house will be sporting radiant floor heating – a dependable curative for encounters with frozen toes at 2 in the morning or a midwinter chill that touches your bone marrow.

Under-floor heat has been used since the Roman Empire when it existed in its prime in communal buildings and the villas of the well-heeled. Hot air was circulated under tile or brick, supplying a radiant heat – energy that transmitted warmth through the flooring and along to cooler furniture like Roman reclining chairs, statues, marble-topped desks and stoic centurions.

With the coming of flexible PEX pipe to the United States in the 1980s, application has taken off as more products have been introduced for the construction industry – among which have been hydro arrangements to supply radiant floor heating. Unlike forced-air furnaces, modern-day hydronic floor arrangements employing PEX plumbing products allow more uniform warmth to a room, are less drying, more capable and a whole lot quieter than aging furnaces or metal steam pipes.

PEX tubing is made of cross-linked polyethylene, which generates these modern pipes strength, chemical resistance, higher mobility, a cost-efficient installation profile and better temperature adaptability. This polyethylene piping can be exposed to water as high as 200 degrees Fahrenheit in heating arrangements.

There are various ways of setting up radiant floor heating. Some use electrical line voltage schemes, but easy-to-use PEX hosing products have made hydronic under-floor heating fashionable with both home builders and house owners. Because the piping is so flexible, its rolls can be used in a continual distance, doing away with the need for multiple joints and fittings.

Numerous radiant floor heating arrangements employ oxygen-barrier PEX radiant piping applied in gypsum concrete. Others integrate low-mass underlay – wood panels with recessed niches for flexible tubing.

Each remodeling or new-construction project is best accommodated by one application or another, so look into your hydronic floor heat alternatives fully. Do your homework!