In-Floor Heating - October 2023 PRO News

Help Keep Your Customers Warm This Winter

Hydronic or Electric?

Hydronic in-floor heating requires a heat source, pumps, valves and sometimes heat exchangers, so the system is more technically complex than electric. If your client wants warm floors in more than a couple of rooms, or if the building is not particularly energy efficient – then the technical complexity of hydronic installations is usually worth the hassles. Hydronics deliver more heat than electric and offers more options for energy sources that will provide the heat. This is especially important if your project has natural gas available. This is typically the cheapest source of home heating energy in Canada. Hydronic in-floor heating is the only option that can use natural gas. Without natural gas, electric in-floor heating is not significantly more expensive to operate than propane or oil.

In-floor Heating & Finished Flooring Choices

Hydronic Installation Options

Electric in-floor heating is fairly simple. It’s just heating wires located as close to the underside of finished floors as possible, but with hydronic systems you have several choices. Your clients will enjoy the best performance with hydronic heating pipes encased in concrete or some hardening mixture on top of a wooden subfloor, though this approach isn’t always easy or practical. Installing pipes below a wood floor happens all the time, but it makes sense to use some kind of metal heat distribution plates to enhance the conduction of heat upwards to the floor.

Choosing a heat source for hydronics is another question you’ll need to help your clients with. Boilers are the traditional option for creating hot water in hydronic systems, but a heavy-duty tank-style water heater is a simpler and more economical option that can do double-duty producing domestic hot water for taps and faucets.

Thermostats and Controls

The one drawback with hydronic in-floor systems is that they can overheat a room quite significantly beyond the thermostat set point – sometimes two to four degrees beyond what’s desired. That’s because by the time an ordinary thermostat senses that a desired room temperature has been achieved and shuts off the flow of hot water, there’s often enough residual heat in the floor and water that room temperature will continue to rise. This is especially an issue when winter turns to spring, and homes everywhere experience significant solar gain during the day. But there’s a solution.

Today’s best hydronic heating controls are smart. They anticipate how much a room will warm beyond the set point and turns the flow of hot water on and off independently of the set point if needed to hit the desired target temperature as accurately as possible. It’s amazing to see these systems learn how quickly a room heats up and cools off for a given outdoor temperature, adjusting the flow of water accordingly. Smart thermostats and control systems routinely maintain room temperatures within 0.5 degrees of the set point.

Help Keep Your Customers Warm This Winter

Hydronic or Electric?

In-floor Heating & Finished Flooring Choices

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