If your home has a lot of problems with drafts in the winter and your heating bill is too high, you might want to consider installing a heated floor.

And, if you install a heated floor and still want carpet (as it feels better on the feet) there is a type of carpet you should buy. If you put the wrong

carpet over a heated floor you will actually not save on heating because the unit will have to work harder. Or, it could be you are going to lay new

ceramic tile and don’t want to walk on a cold floor each morning.

The radiant-heated floor is a solution for warming your house plus saving on heating costs. This type of floor has been in European homes for

quite some time. Water is heated to between 80 and 125 degrees Fahrenheit and run through tubing installed underneath the top of the floor. A

very easy structure to build is what is known as a suspended heated floor that can be installed over the top of your existing concrete floor.

The design is simple. First of all, you make sure you have a flat hard surface (usually your concrete foundation). What you will do is take lumber

and build a frame the shape of your room that will suspend a sheet of plywood over rubber tubing that runs the hot water. This is why it is called

“suspended” because the top level of plywood is suspended over the hot water tube.

Use 2 by 4-inch lumber to lay out the frame of your suspended floor. The suspended floor will be raised about 1 and one half inches so that the

rubber tubing will rest underneath with no pressure on top of it. The 2 by 4s are spaced out evenly and laid flat. These are called sleepers and the

rubber tubing is run up and down within each cell. The idea is to run the tubing so that it covers the maximum amount of floor.

Once the suspended floor frame is built and the rubber tubing run, you now have to use a substance to conduct the heat and disperse it evenly.

Simple sand spread out evenly within the suspended frame is an excellent and inexpensive heat conductor. If you do not want to use sand then

aluminum sheeting will work too. Finally, nail plywood to the top of the frame and then install your ceramic tiles, hardwood flooring, or carpet.

You will have to place the feeder and return leads of the tubing where your boiler unit is. There are various vendors who sell the units. One catalog

can be found at http://www.electromn.com/pdf/BL003.pdf. There are different boiler options. Some even have units that heat the water through

solar panels.

The other item to address is if you want to lay carpet as the top flooring. Before you decide which type of carpet to buy you must consider the

thermal resistance/R-value of both the carpet and the carpet pad. If your carpet has a high R-value then it will actually insulate you on the surface

from the heated tubing below. Your pump will have to work harder to get heat to the surface.

The carpet you buy should have an R-value between 2.0 and 4.0—preferably 2.0. Choose lower-pile carpeting and if you can avoid the pad. If you

want the pad then it should have the same of lower R-value if possible.