Choosing The Best Flooring For Your Radiant Heating System
If you 've decided to install radiant floor heating in your new home, your next decision is to select the right type of flooring. Since a radiant heating system is underneath the floor in your home, the type of material you use for flooring can help or hinder how well the heat is dispersed throughout your house. Here 's a look at how different types of flooring material work with a radiant heating system.
Stone, Ceramic, And Porcelain
Marble, travertine, porcelain, and ceramic are ideal materials to use with radiant heating. Stone flooring tends to be very chilly in the winter, even if the air in your home is nice and warm. With a traditional heating system, a stone, ceramic, or porcelain floor may be too cold to walk on barefoot in the winter.
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Hardwood Floors
While hardwood floors are not an ideal match for radiant floor heating, the two can be used together in the right circumstances. Wood expands and contracts along with changes in temperature and humidity. This puts a lot of stress on the floor over time, especially when the temperature changes are sudden or extreme. This leads to warping and cracking of the wood. One solution is to install engineered wood floors. These planks are made of layers of hardwood and fiberboard. This makes them more stable and less prone to damage from expansion and contraction. Another potential problem with wood flooring is that it isn 't a good conductor of heat. So while the floor stays warm to your feet, the heat doesn 't disperse throughout the house as well as it would with a stone floor.
When thinking about how well the flooring conducts heat, you also want to think about energy efficiency. One of the big perks of radiant floor heating is that it evenly warms your home for less cost than traditional heat. If you cover the heating system with an insulator such as carpeting rather than a conductor such as stone, you may not see as much savings on your energy