By Sarah Green Carmichael
Before we moved to the suburbs, my husband and I somehow won the apartment rental lottery. We scored a two bedroom, two bathroom, apartment in the city — and, in unheard-of fashion for a rental, one of the bathrooms had electric floor heat under our bathroom tiles.
Those heated floors were a game-changer. Once we got used to life without chilly tile floors, there was no going back. We never even used the other bathroom as a bathroom — it just became a giant storage closet (albeit one with a toilet).
Then we moved.
When we bought our 1860 house in Concord, we knew our new lives were going to take some getting used to — for better and for worse. There were suddenly longer commutes and fewer restaurants (not to mention less money to spend on them). On the plus side, there were new activities — like gardening and road biking (which was now a hobby and no longer a way to commute). But as we’ve adapted to life in this lovely, leafy town, one thing I have never gotten used to: freezing cold bathroom floors.
So when we renovated our upstairs bathroom, we knew we wanted heated floors. Since we like to keep the house temperature low — especially at night — our bathroom floors were like ice. Wandering in there early in the morning, or in the middle of the night, was always a nasty wake-up call.
Maybe my Yankee ancestors felt some sort of Puritanical thrill in the feeling of frigid floors against bare feet, but we’d tasted the good life — and we wanted it back.
In our old apartment, not only were the heated floors a small luxury every morning when we wandered sleepily to the shower, they’d actually helped our bathroom floors dry more quickly after those showers. This helped our floors stay cleaner and less slippery.
In our new house, we thought heated floors would be even more of an asset. Like a lot of antique homes, the existing heating system was fairly inefficient and the insulation was minimal. Underfloor heating has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention in recent years as a fairly efficient way to supplement other forms of heating — it requires less energy and heats more evenly. Yes, it heats the floor — but it also adds warmth to the whole room. We thought it heated floors would add significant comfort to our home at a minimum level of financial cost and environmental impact.
We knew what we wanted — the only question was how.
Choosing Warmup
Warmup’s heated floor systems offered the additional benefits of easy installation and flexible configuration. We’d also heard good things about their efficiency, service, and maintenance (basically, that there is none needed). Finally, we also really liked the look of the control panel — while some thermostats look more or less like your old TI-82 calculator from high school trigonometry class, the Warmup thermostat is sleek and attractive. It also can be set to work on a timer, so that your warm floor is waiting for you when you wake up in the morning or come home at night.
Designing and Installing the Heating Mats was easy. Our contractor, Concord Carpenter, sent Warmup a detailed diagram of the bathroom. They design a system for my floor and send me back a diagram on how to lay it out.
The heating mats self-stick right onto the tile underlayment and thin-set is then applied over the heating mat prior to tiling. An in floor sensor provides feed back to the thermostat.
Contractor’s Note on Electric Floor Heat
In my remodeling projects I often solve heat deficiencies with Warmup Electric radiant floor heat. The heating mats do not take up a lot of space so they impact floor height minimally… a plus when trying to match adjacent room floor heights!
Offering radiant floor heat to my remodel clients is a realistic and high ROI up-sell. Using Warmup products have allowed me to solve heat problems and increase my clients User Experience tremendously! If you follow my website you know that at ConcordCarpenter we pay a lot of attention to what we call usability, or UX (user experience) how can we design or install something to make it supremely easy and intuitive for our clients to interact with?
Installing Warmup electric radiant heat is a low cost, small addition to a floor installation . . . with a vastly superior UX.
Final Product
Now that fall is coming back to New England and the nights are getting longer and chillier, we’re grateful to be back in the land of heated floors. The Warmup coils work beautifully underneath our marble tile floor, and chilly feet are a distant memory.
How I Solve Remodeling Problems With Electric Radiant Heat
Floor heat is a GREAT up-sell as well as an instant solution to under heated bathrooms.
