Radiant Flooring, Energy Efficient Floors

It was a few years back that I first got my bare feet into a new situation.  Radiant Flooring!  Whoa, this was some great feeling, especially after getting out of the shower in the winter and having a warm and cozy floor for me to stand on.  Of course, I was visiting a family member of mine and he had this done on his whole home.  At the time I didn’t think much of it besides the fact that it was pretty much the greatest floor experience I had ever had, I guess you could have said, “I was floored!”.  Enough with the puns.

Today, though, it seems that radiant flooring is more than just a novelty in your average home.  It is indeed a highly efficient way to heat (and in some cases cool) your home.  Here’s a little outline on how it works.

Workers embed plastic tubing into your concrete floors.  The thermal mass and conductance that is inherent in concrete helps to spread this heating and cooling evening throughout the floor providing a consistent and unusually comfortable temperature to the air in the house.  There are basically two types of radiant or energy efficient flooring, thin slab and slab-on-grade flooring.  The basic difference is the slab on grade is an intensive process usually more dedicated to new home builders.  In this model, the tubing is attached to a a wire mesh and then the concrete is poured over it making the floor.  With thin slab radiant flooring, a sub-floor is built where the tubing is attached, after which a standard wood floor is built over it.  In both cases they are highly effective and energy efficient.

Here’s some pictures of what they look like inside and out:

As you can see, the tubing runs all around the underside of the floor and eventually heads back to a heating system of some kind.  Of course you can have a variety of methods in place to heat the liquid and that varies from one system to the next.

Here’s another look:

Here you can see the process of building slab-on-grade radiant flooring before the rest of the home or business is built.  These types of systems can save 10-30% on your heating costs and in some cases for even bigger businesses or commercial spaces, up to 60% can be saved on heating costs.

In any case, radiant floors are an awesome and luxurious addition to a home that you don’t have to feel bad about as you are indeed increasing your home’s energy efficiency.  We highly recommend taking a look into this technology especially if you are looking into building a home from the ground up.

Here are some helpful links:

http://www.nuheat.com/home.html

http://www.radiantcompany.com/

http://www.floorheatech.ca/