Heated Concrete Walls

This article explains how to avoid some fatal mistakes when installing radiant heat in a concrete floor slab by describing an incompetent radiant heat floor installation along with an explanation of why things went wrong and how to avoid these errors.

Heated concrete walls.

For concrete floor radiant heating systems the warm water tubing or electric heating elements can either be embedded within the slab on grade anywhere from the bottom of the slab to within 2 inches of the surface depending on the design and installation technique or fastened to the top of a concrete subfloor and then covered with an overlay. Radiant heating system design or installation mistakes that must be avoided. The most cost effective system for medium to larger homes is hydronic since the amount of power it would take to heat a whole home with electric would be substantial. The 40 foot wall would contain about 744 800 times 0 9 or 670 320 btu more for a 35 degree f rise in temperature.

The most common application however is an in floor heating system installed between the finished concrete slab and the flooring above. While it was done as a new house was being built in my last house i poured a concrete floor on top of a wood framed floor system and could have put radiant heat in th. Heat loss through concrete wall i have a 600 sqft rec room built around the turn of the century. I d like to move one wall about 2 ft but i am afraid to drill into the concrete for fear i ll puncture a tube.

This is about installing hydronic radiant floor heating in a slab floor system. There s two basic types of concrete floor heating hydronic and electric. They used poured concrete strange i know for the walls. For example a bathroom on a slab would feature a layer of cork or synthetic cork underlayment on top of the concrete subfloor followed by the electric heating element and topped with the flooring substrate.

I have replaced all the windows in the room added insulation to the ceiling but the room is still too cold to use when the. The heat takes several hours to travel through the wall before it is released into the home s living areas. Properly designed it should. The room is heated with hot water baseboard installed in 1919.

Unfortunately our data doesn t show the cost to remove the old driveway but we do show the average asphalt paving cost 4 457 and concrete driveway cost 3 650. Due to it s density and low conductivity concrete retains heat very well. How does radiant heat work. The workers in the photograph at page top where our concrete slab.

Concrete with a high percentage of aggregate has a 10 percent lower specific heat capacity at about 0 18 btu lb degree f. Radiant floor hydronic water heating system. A trombe wall is a north facing heavy wall made of concrete or some other thermal mass material located behind a layer of glass. Looking at our data the average cost of a radiant heating system installation is 3 892 with a low of 1 300 and a high of 7 500 in that range.