Radiant Floor Heating Offers Tiptoe Comfort
Your partner got up in the middle of the night and now those cold toes are occupying your personal space with the tenacity of a heat-seeking projectile. Good for you, the new house will be sporting radiant floor heating – a dependable remedy for meetings with cold feet at 2 in the morning or a midwinter chill that reaches your bone marrow.
Under-floor heating has been around since the Roman Empire when it was in its peak in communal buildings and the villas of the well-heeled. Hot air was circulated beneath tile or brick, offering a radiant warmth – energy that channeled warmth through the flooring and along to colder objects like Roman recumbant chairs, statues, marble-topped tables and stoic centurions.
With the advent of resilient PEX pipe in the United States in the 1980s, its use has rocketed as more products have been created for the construction industry – among which have been hydro systems to furnish radiant floor heat. Unlike forced-air furnaces, modern hydro floor systems utilizing PEX plumbing products provide more uniform warmth to a room, are less drying, more efficient and a whole lot quieter than aging furnaces or metal steam pipes.
PEX tubing is made of cross-linked polyethylene, which yields these space-age pipes durability, chemical resistance, high mobility, a streamlined installment profile and greater temperature range. This polyethylene tubing can be used with water as hot as 200° Fahrenheit in heat arrangements.
There are several modes of installing radiant floor heating. Many use electrical line voltage systems, but easy-to-use PEX tubing products have made hydronic under-floor heat fashionable with both home builders and house owners. Because the hosing is so flexible, its rolls can be used in a sustained distance, eradicating the requirement for multiple joints and fittings.
Some radiant floor heating schemes utilize oxygen-barrier PEX radiant hosing utilized in gypsum concrete. Others integrate low-mass underlay – wood boards with sunken niches for flexible pipe.
Each reconstruction or new-construction project is better suited by one application or another, so investigate your hydronic floor heat alternatives fully. Do your homework!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 5:17 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.