wiredfool

Existing floor is carpet over plywood subfloor. This a first floor room over a crawlspace area. Room is ~120sf, 10×12′

***Flooring Options:

1. Bamboo Hardwood Flooring at ~$10/sf installed. Looking at a planking system with a cherry finish. This is an ecologically sound flooring system, as the entire process is designed to be low impact on the envrionment. Sustainable development and all that. Planking is 1/2-3/4″ thick, and uses three layer cross grain construction. Should be dimensionally stable, suitable for a floating installation.
2. Pergo Presto, in cherry planked. This is not as good looking as the real wood, since the grain is printed on from a photograph had the texture is somewhat unrelated to the printed grain pattern. Should last long enough, is cheaper and thinner. Moulding is available to match. 3/8″ thick, ~$5/sf installed.
3. Existing carpet. (rejected option).

***Sub floor electrical radiant heat.
Ideally, this is something that will supplement the current inwall electrical forced air heater to make the floor nice and toasty when walking around in bare feet.

Generally several options:

Thinset Vs Gypcrete vs whatever else.

There are a few systems that use wires laid out then encased in gypcrete or thinset. I’f it comes to gypcrete, the radiant heating isn’t going to happen. (1″ of liquid mud laid down over the wires, which then dries.) That might be appropriate for a bathroom, but not this. Thinset might be an option, depending on compatibility with flooring.

I’ve also seen some references to electrical mat systems that lay out an entire mat instead of individual wires. This seems to be a better option, but there seems to be a lot less experience with this sort of thing.

10 or 15 W/sf

Most places I’ve seen say that 15w/sf is only appropriate for tile/ceramic flooring, but then turn around and suggest it for any floor put through their calculator. I’m guessing that 15w/sf would probably enough to heat the entire room without needing a bacup heater in the wall.

• Warmly yours Seems to have one of the easier products to install. It uses a 110 volt system and foil mats. (or rolls or plain mats.) These appear to be slightly more than $10/sf covered, but that will probably work out to abou $10/sf over the entire room.

  For a bamboo engineered plank floor, I’m looking at the 10w/sf mesh, since the foil requires installation between the flooring and padding. The mesh shoud be installed in 3/8″ of thinset or self leveling cement. coverage would be roughly 6″ from the wall on each side of the room, giving about 90sf heating coverage. This can be done with the 1.5′ wide roll @ 60 feet long, $895 + 149 for the (programmable) thermostat. Requires an 8 amps, on a 15 amp curcuit. Would probably not be a primary heating in the coldest times, but should be fine most of the winter. 1800-875-5285, has worked with tile specialists before.

• Advanced radiant can do a wire system in 3/4″ of dry set mortar. They need a dedicated 240v line. Lead time of about a week, about a day installation. Looking at ~2k. Will probably increase the height of the floor by 1/4″ or so. (ponder taking out the parquet in the hallway and putting in bamboo there. ) Mentioned that timbergrass is a good local producer of bamboo flooring.