![]() ![]() you will spend 5 times that just to do the work you are talking about, not to mention you will still have to pay to fire the boiler to heat the water to run through the radiant floor. even if you left it running 24 hours a day for 4 months (the typical heating season), it would only cost you $400 to heat that space for that period of time. 1 1.5kw electric space heater costs 15cents to run for an hour. However, I tell this fact customers all the time. just lay it on the old slab prior to pouring the new concrete.Ĭoncrete will be cheaper to install than OSB, be more stable and have far higher thermal mass (which will take longer to warm up but will radiate the heat longer so its actually more efficient from a heating/cooling cycle perspective) To minimize thickness, you can use foil insulation liner to act as a thermal reflector. you could easily pour a concrete floor at this thickness if you use use fiber reinforced mpa30 or higher concrete (air entrained or not). so your total floor height is going to be 1.625" or so, before you put your flooring on. this is going to add another 1/2" or so, 5/8" really. We also have routed 180 degree return bends for the PEX tubing when using ThermoFin U.Īssuming you are going to put a finished floor over top of all of this, you are going to have to add another layer on top of the radiators to subfloor it. You are making a sandwich of aluminum and plywood to evenly heat the structure and provide a friendly surface for the flooring installation. See the PDF multipage spec sheet that is linked on the U-fin page of our site. ![]() The ThermoFin U heat transfer plates are easier to install if the fins are down against the subfloor and plywood sleepers on the fins. Heating up the mass of concrete is not necessarily a good thing when you want the entire surface floor to be warmed. The energy without the layer of insulation will be drawn into the concrete, and the response time would be longer in heating the floor. Keep in mind that you want the heat energy to be going into the plywood sleepers and the finish floor, which is why we recommend the Rboard®. It will work with 1/2" plywood if necessary. The fasteners will hold best if you can use 3/8" plywood. On top of the Rboard® you would put down a layer of plywood. For a ThermoFin U installation on concrete, you would build a surface to be able to screw the plates into by first putting down a layer of Atlas Rboard®, recommended 1/2", which you should be able to get from your local building supplier.Ī Google search on Atlas Rboard® will bring up their site and the product info. The preferred method is to install the plates with the fins down. Or am I totally missing something really obvious here? I don't want to lay the PEX down and pour concrete over it because that goes into a whole other topic about thermal mass and heat loss.įrom Radiant Engineering, thanks for discussing our ThermoFin U product. I'm hoping someone could chime and provide some feedback to this approach. I've attached a quick and dirty picture to illustrate what I mean (screws are not to scale). Finally, I'll use 1" screws (still figuring out that part) to fasten the fins to the two layers of OSB. This should provide enough height for the fins to fit in. Next, I'd cut the same kind of 1/2" OSB into sections just under 8" in width and place them in between the groves. ![]() Next, get ~1/2" OSB boards and cut 1/4" dado grooves 8" OC where the fins will be placed and make a floating subfloor out of it. My current best guess to the ideal way of doing this is to first start with a 6 mil poly sheet as a vapor barrier. I'm also planning to go with an engineered hardwood floor atop. In their brochures and pictures, the fins are shown attached downward but I'm thinking it may be better to face them upward. ![]() I was provided a sample of the aluminum fin and its height measured to just under 3/4". I'm trying to figure out the ideal way to install it with the minimal loss of height. I've looked at several products for heat distribution, like Warmboard, before settling on this: I'm trying to figure out the most ideal way to install hydronic radiant heat in my basement over the existing concrete slab. ![]()
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