So I’m going to share with you a heated
flooring system I installed in this basement bathroom. Basement bathrooms are always cold. It’s something that I felt was absolutely
needed if you’re going to use it all the time, especially in the winter climates where
we are. I found this system on Amazon called Warming
System. By the time you will finish this video, you
will feel comfortable about installing it, and you’ll save yourself hundreds of dollars. You see the system that I found was on Amazon. We’ll put links down below. It’s called Warming System. They have different models of it, but I purchased
the loos wire system mainly because my bathroom floor was not level, and I was going to self-level
anyway.
So I got the loose wire. It comes with cable guides that route your
cable. One of the features I thought was really great
is they give you this little monitor that you attach to your wire. And basically if you were to cut your wire
or do something by accident, it signals to you that something went wrong. So I think this was a great little extra feature
they had in the kit. The kit really came with the wire, the cable
guides, the thermostat, and this little monitor. I mean they have an all-inclusive package
for a couple of hundred bucks. I thought it was fantastic. And not only that, but they have systems that
would go from 10 sq ft all the way to 100 sq ft in 5 sq ft increments.
That’s one thing a lot of people do when
they install heating flooring systems, they usually end up using too much wire, and you’re
not able to cut this wire to make it fit within your bathroom. Let’s go through how you need to measure
your bathroom for picking the right system. So as far as measuring, you need to exclude
some things within your bathroom. When you’re looking at the design of your
bathroom, make sure you exclude the area of your toilet. Typically, a 2’ x 2’ area, exclude that
from the actual square footage of your bathroom. You don’t want that wire to be too close
to your toilet flange and obviously heating up your wax ring and causing problems. You also, if you had a regular vanity that
went all the way to the ground, you don’t want it to be underneath of that vanity.
In this situation, we had a floating vanity,
so we have heated floor everywhere. If you had standard vanity, you want to exclude
the area that’s underneath of that vanity. You’re basically keeping the wire 2 inches
away from the wall. That’s not going to be a whole lot of square
footage there, but you want to account for a square foot or two to keep it away from
the wall. Now, in this system, which I was excited to
do, is that we actually ended up doing the shower floor as well because this is a fairly
big shower. It’s basically 4×4, and I wanted to have
heating in here as well. So I brought the heating up over the curb
and into the shower. You always want to make sure that you have
a little bit of room around your drain. You don’t want to have the wire too close
to your drain, excluding approximately a square foot of the center of that would do it.
Again, making sure that you exclude the toilet
area, the vanity area, and any plumbing vent or if you had a duct work vent, you would
want to leave an area away from there. Subtract that from your area and then, like
I said, you can get these in 5-sq-ft increments, so you should be able to easily find the system
that would fit your bathroom.
The first thing I did to prep for this is
to make sure that I had a dedicated circuit for my heated flooring system. You always want to make sure that you get
a dedicated circuit all the way to your electric panel for a heated flooring system. Anything with a heating source, you don’t
want to be attaching to existing wiring in your bathroom. So I ran a 20A wire to my subpanel, basically
a 12/2 gauge wire. And we did a 120V system on this. I put in a metal box, a larger mud ring box,
that allowed me to have more room within the box for my thermostat wires and all the wires
that I was going to be housing it. I ran conduit down. Conduit is an easy path to fish your wires
in because you’re going to have your drywall up before you install this system. So prepping the electrical is pretty much
the number one thing you want to do so that you can easily run your heated wiring into
the box.
So after our drywall was in and we had our
electrical prepped, we went ahead and installed the cable guides. They’re just little, plastic cable guides
to run your wires to space them properly. They would come in 12-inch lengths, and you
can just cut them down to fit the size of your room. So we installed with a hot glue gun. So we ran our wires, the spacing about 3 inches,
keeping 2 inches away from the wall, staying away from our toilet.
What we also did was go up over the curb. So you want to make sure when you go up over
a curb that you basically isolate everything with thinset. When we were doing our mud bed, we installed
the cable within the mud bed all at the same time. It’s a little bit challenging to get the
wire spaced properly within the mud pan. But if you take your time and pack everything
nicely, it works out beautifully. Once all the cables were set, we always want
to make sure that none of them are touching each other, that they have the 3-inch spacing.
You don’t want to be wrapping the wires
to each other. Everything has to be separated. So using additional hot glue or whatever it
takes to separate them is the way to go. And then we just floor leveled over our entire
system. The product that I used on this particular
one was called ARDEX TL 1000. It was kind of an affordable floor leveler
made by ARDEX. You had to make sure that you primed your
surface before installing it. The primer after the cables were installed,
we basically just used a brush to brush in our primer.
And then we floor leveled it. Three or four hours later, we were able to
start waterproofing over this entire shower system and floor. As far as electrical testing of your system…
this is very important; you always want to do this. As soon as you get the package, use a simple
ohm reader. On the label, it will give you a range of
what that reading should be. These don’t cost a whole lot of money. You can get this at your local Home Depot
or Lowe’s for like $20. But basically, you’re just switching this
to your ohm reading, you’re touching your wires to your cables, and you’re just making
sure that the reading shows the rating that’s on there.
There’s a label on your wire that will give
you the range of what the ohm reading should be. So you want to: number one, test it when you
first get it out of the package—before you even take the cable off the roll, you want
to test it—number two, is after you run your wires through your entire system, you
want to test it; and then finally after you’re done floor leveling and installing the tile,
you want to test it one more time just to make sure that there’s nothing wrong with
your cables.
The real thing that gives you peace of mind
is that if you have this connected to your wires the whole time and you’re not hearing
any siren, then you’re pretty much good to go. Heated flooring systems over concrete should
have a thermal break. We did not do that in this video basically
due to budget and height difference. A thermal break would basically be something
that just isolates your concrete. So whether that’s insulation or an insulation
mat of some sort, that will prevent the entire concrete floor from warming. Keep that in mind if you want to make things
more efficient to do that. But I have to say I’m really impressed with
the uniform heat of this. We only have this set on 60° and it feels
tremendous in here. If you’re doing a shower, it is recommended
by warming systems to have a separate wire that you fully use in the shower.
So you can use a cable outside and a cable
in the shower. Main reason for that is if anything were to
happen to the shower cable, you would not be able to repair that cable in a shower. So having separate wires, if it went bad,
then at least you have heating out here. But we just did one continuous cable in here—again,
a budget thing. I hope these tips helped you out. Gives us a thumbs up if they have; helps other
people find this video. Check out the links below; we have the links
to this system below.
We’ll see you in the next video, thanks..
