In the winter, my house always had ice cold floors. The existing heating system was wood stove and propane forced air. I decided to start checking into heating solutions for our home, and see if I could improve our setup with radiant heated flooring.
It looked like the most promising option was DIY radiant floor heating utilizing an outdoor woodstove boiler system. Electric radiant heating seemed like it would cost too much on a monthly basis. I really liked solar water heating systems, but I was afraid we didn’t have enough sun in the short winter days to make this work.
After coming up with a basic installation plan with measurements, I came up with a parts list to take to the home improvement center. There I ordered all of the parts I needed to get started. I knew I would be back as soon as I ran into anything I didn’t think of!
There are two ways to proceed with hydronic heating on a existing laminate or hardwood covered floor. One would be to remove the flooring, lay down the PEX tubing and recover it with laminate or hardwood. As you can well imagine, this might raise the floor by as much as two inches, and I didn’t want to do that since this would involve refinishing the trim, cabinets and doorways.
The second way would be to place tubing underneath the floor from the bottom. I didn’t like the idea of moving around in the crawl space for hours, but it seemed like the least amount of work. it would require drilling holes in the floor joists as well as hanging tubing with clips.
The insulated hot water and return lines for the boiler were buried eight feet down to keep them thawed out all winter. They entered the house at the utility room from underneath. I installed the holding tank and pump in this room as well, with barely any room to spare.
A DIY radiant heat system is a lot of work and a little bit of a frustration too. It will pay for itself in lower monthly heating costs though. And now, I never get cold feet standing in the bathroom or the kitchen.
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