When my husband and I bought our house, the flooring with it was a mess. It was water damaged and coming up in pieces. We agreed that we were going to gut the floors and put brand new tile flooring down. I researched how to set up my own tile floors and heated flooring came up immediately. In order to have this wonderful heating system, you need to remove the flooring anyway. The electric heated mats either go under the new tile or piping is built within the tile and connected to a boiler system.
Wait, did you say a boiler system? If you read my previous blog titled, A house in shambles and an old boiler, you will understand why I was so excited to hear that there was a way to incorporate a boiler. My house came with a giant boiler. My house needed new flooring. Fate was telling me that I had to have hydronic heating. The cost of putting in this heating system typically can be quite high. However, since most of the work and heavy duty equipment was in place, it did not cost me much. The HVAC business I used was able to hook right up to the existing boiler. I had the flooring totally ripped up for them so that they could lay pipe down. After it was set up, my husband and I bought a tile cutter and set up our own heated flooring unit.
Since everything was being installed during the building process, everything was set up perfectly. The piping was laid to allow for no hot or cold spots. The tile floors were laid ideally with no half tile pieces or chunks coming off the floor. The final product looked amazing and felt amazing.