Warming Up Second-Floor Bathrooms and Bedrooms At the project house, the temperature in the tubing will rise and fall with the weather-running between 85 and 90 degrees on winter’s mild days and as high as 130 or 140 on the coldest days. This limit, explains Richard, ensures that the floor’s surface doesn’t rise above 85 degrees, which can break down tile mastics and warp wood. The manifold gets its hot water from the boiler, which has a special mixing valve that’s set to deliver water at no higher than 140 degrees F. Every room or zone has a separate thermostat turning it up sends warm water to the room, raising the room temperature. Each room’s tubing feeds into the manifold’s supply, loops around under the floor, and reconnects at the return. The TOH project house has a manifold in the basement where all the tubing originates and returns. In a first-floor retrofit, all these either already exist or are easy to locate nearby. At the project house, the crew will spray foam insulation over the tubing between the joists, forming a tight seal.Ī radiant floor heating system needs a hot-water supply, a connection between the tubing and the plumbing, and a pump to move the water from one to the other. Insulation beneath the tubing is critical to keeping the heat moving up into the floor, rather than dispersing every which way. “You don’t want to trap the heat under a sealed box,” he explains. In a kitchen or family room, though, Richard takes care not to run it under cabinets or other built-ins. The tubing snakes uninterrupted from bay to bay through holes drilled at least 2 inches from the edges of each joist. “So the aluminum sucks the heat out and conducts it to the subfloor.” The tracks keep the tubing evenly spaced at 6 to 8 inches to avoid cold spots. “Plastic like PEX is not a good transfer medium,” says Richard. Installing radiant floor heating in existing homes begins with aluminum tracks being screwed between the joists, which hold PEX (cross-linked polyethylene) tubing carrying hot water. It can go under most existing flooring, including wood, tile, vinyl, and even carpet. In most houses, the only place to do this is on a first floor where joist bays are open to the space below. The best way to retrofit radiant floor heating without disturbing an existing floor is to do it from below, against the underside of the subfloor. A single length of tubing will loop under each first-floor room | Photo by Russell Kaye Richard feeds the PEX tubing to heating contractor John Perry, who pushes it along a joist bay.
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