Floors Warm Up to Radiant Heat
Posted on: 2014-02-20
If you have a furnace in your home, chances are your home is heated by one type of radiant heat. This method of heating up a room is effective, since the heat has a chance to spread around and reach every corner. Although some types of radiant heat are given off by wall mounted heaters or baseboard ventilation systems, another popular type is the in-floor radiant heating system.
How Does it Work?
This type of heating system uses a series of pipes mounted underneath the floorboards. Have you ever stepped out of bed on a cold winter morning and been woken up immediately by how cold the floors are? That doesn’t happen with in-floor radiant heat systems. Because the heating pipes are under the floor, the floors are kept toasty warm. The system takes advantage of the fact that heat rises in order to keep the rest of your house warm. This heating can be especially effective to heat up chilly ceramic tile flooring!
What’s the Downside?
Although a radiant heating system is very effective, it does come with one downside: anything kept on the floor will become warm as well. This means that you cannot keep anything electronic or heat sensitive on your floor. Computers will overheat, electronics can become damaged, and candles stored on the floor of a closet can melt over time.
So… Bottomline?
With that said, these types of flooring have several advantages that make up for these minor issues. They heat every section of your home more efficiently than a standard ventilation shaft type heating system. And, since they use hot water that goes through those pipes to heat your home, they use less natural gas or heating oil. Plus, there’s the cold floor problem described above – a radiant heating system prevents this from happening. No more cold floors!
Ready to renovate your flooring? Contact Parabola Developments today!
Photo by Emma Frances Logan on Unsplash
