How to Install Environ Flex Floor-Heating Rolls

hello today we're going to be talking about installing our Environ flex rolls over a concrete floor and under laminate and what you'll need to do to do that the best way. We're taking a look at the roll right now and there's a couple things I want you to notice on the roll first of all here is our cold lead which is going to have to be routed back over to the wall and then up to the thermostat but on this cold lead you'll notice that there's a couple little stickers on here, one is a yellow sticker it tells you what the voltage is so this says 120 volts on it the idea there is you don't want to be mixing 120 volt rolls with 240 volt rolls you must do the whole job in the same voltage, so please take note of that on here is our UL label which will tell us what our ohms values are for this mat and also if you take a look on the roll itself you'll see a sticker that says this side up this product needs to be installed with this side up and we'll show you that a little bit later okay what we've done now is we've put Cork down on our cement slab and the Cork does a couple things it acts as an insulator which keeps the heat from going down into the slab and it forces it up through the flooring so you feel more of the heat and it also gives us a place to route our cold lead cables from the end of the mat back to the wall the thing to keep in mind with this type of installation is is that it's a purely floating installation the laminate is going to float over the top of this the environ flex rolls are not fastened down to anything they float under the flooring and the cork that's sitting on top of the concrete slab it is floating also, so this entire system is a floating installation which makes it about the easiest floor installation you can do for flooring. 

 I've assembled all the things we're going to need to do our installation of, what I've also included here is a circuit check whenever you're doing a cut and turn product like this it's always a good idea to have a circuit check on while you're doing your cuts and turns because then it can scream at you if you happen to damage the wire while you're doing those, also what I like to do is I also like to mark the location of the splice and the cold lead on the the cork itself so I can then remove the product go ahead and trench out the cork and then go ahead and put it back down one thing we need to talk about when you're installing the cork is you lay the cork down in a brick type pattern so you don't put two of them together as you go like this you want to make sure you do two here then you offset like a brick you would see on the side of a building. Alright we can take a look at the roll right now we can see where the cold lead enters the roll this area where the cold lead enters the roll will also have to be trenched out of the court to allow it to fit flat so your laminate doesn't teeter-totter when you walk over it. 

Okay before you install the product you want to make sure it's good so what you want to do is you want to test it with a digital ohmmeter you want to set it for the 200 range and the first test you're going to do is you're going to do from the two core wires which in this case this is a 120 volt system is from yellow to black and make sure that that number matches the value that's shown on our tag and it does so the next thing we want to do is we want to make sure that we don't have any shorts a way to do that is to test from the black to the ground we have nothing and the next thing is to test from yellow to ground and we have nothing that tells us that the mat is good after we do our cuts and turns we'll do the same test again and then after we install the flooring we'll do the same test again remember between that while we're cutting and turning we're going to put on the circuit check and then while we're laying the floor we're also going to be putting the circuit check on all right we're ready to do like a test fit here and when you get this product from WarmlyYours it'll probably come with an installation plan the installation plan will tell you how long to do each run and then when to do the cuts if you look on the mat itself you can see that the wire is spaced every two inches and it'll tell you at what distance you are supposed to make your first second third fourth cut and the idea is if you want the product to be able to turn to the left you have to cut the mat never ever cut the wire and do it here so the product will allow you to turn left and that's what we're going to do we're going to make a left turn so right now I'm going to mark the location of where the mat starts I'm also going to make a locate a mark of where the cold lead exits the mat and I'm also going to make a mark on here where the cold lead runs into the mat because remember we're going to cut that trench that out so it will sit down in the cork and down on the concrete so you don't get that teeter-totter effect so let's go ahead and take a look at the underside of the mat remember this side always has to be facing downward if we take a closer look here we can see the cable is allowed to come out of the mat at this location and what we're going to do is we're going to be cutting this here with a pair of scissors that will allow us to turn the mat back and do a 180 degree turn and go back towards the wall so I have this area here and I make my cut right in the middle between the two wires and then make sure I lift the cable up before I cut under it with the scissors now we can see that the mat will separate and will allow us to do a 180 degree turn while keeping the wire down when we do the layout we should be able to get the mat right next to the other mat but the thing you want to do is if you look here, here is the loop from this mat and here is the loop from this mat you want to try to offset these loops so the ends are offset you'd prefer not to put the loops so the two ends are close together if there's no way around that then what you might want to do is you might want to move it apart a little bit because you can't have the wires touching each other so if you have, if you're in a tight space we suggest moving the mat down a little bit to offset the loops and if you have the space maybe move it apart just about a quarter of an inch or have or something like that so these two wires are not touching each other and at this point we can go ahead and mark the locations of the mat once you get experience with this you may not have to make the marks on the edges I just like to do it because sometimes if you have to lift it back it does get moved around a little bit so sometimes it's better to mark the edges where they lie that way you know where each of one of the runs begins and where it ends and now I have marked the location of where my cold lead is coming out so now it comes time to make our cut into the cork always make sure that you keep the really sharp blades away from the product so we've made our cut and the idea is to get the cable, if you can see it has like a flat side and it it's a little narrower on one side we want to get that to come down and that gives us a nice flat feeling, let's go ahead and take a look here at the splice in them the roll here we can see how that fits right into the cut out that we made to help with the installation as you get it back to where you had it aligning with your marks and then use a piece of good quality tape you can use high-temperature tape or you can use regular tape it doesn't really matter because the cold lead does not get hot it only begins to get hot down in this area but this will help us keep this cold lead down in the gap and it will also create a little space so it feels nice and flat okay remember this is a purely a floating floor and if you want to you can just tape the edges in place to hold them in place so they don't migrate they don't drift on you but there's no need to actually glue this to the floor or glue the flooring to this you just can use this to hold the edges in place while you put the flooring on top. 

Okay now that we have the mat laid out we need to worry about how we're going to get the leads up to the thermostat with one mat it's a very simple installation you probably want to put a piece of conduit down the wall from the thermostat and put a hole here and route the cable up through the hole in the in the plate and then up to the thermostat. Your local code may require that you do that in conduit if so you run the conduit between the floor level and the thermostat now let's say that you have three or four or five different mats say you have a really big installation it's going to be very difficult to get all these cold leads up the wall to the back of the thermostat so if you have a job that's 2 or 3 or 4 mats what you might want to do is you might want to put a hole in the wall here and mount a junction box at the ground level because that will allow you to run all of your mats back to the junction box make your connection here to a single wire of romex that runs from here up to the thermostat with a single job like this it's very easy to get that wire up when you're doing 2 3 4 5 mats you'll want to install a junction box at the base of the wall directly below the thermostat wire them all here and into a single run up the conduit with a single cable all right now we need to get our cables or a cold lead back to the wall so I'm going to mark the location of where the cold lead is running and I'm going to trench that out so we have a nice smooth surface now it's time to test our thermostat sensor because we need to get a thermostat sensor installed into our floor here so what we need to do is we need to get our digital ohmmeter and we need to set it to the 20k range I have the meter set for the 20k range and now it's time to test our our sensor you want to make sure that you do this without touching the wires with your hands so you just find something to pin the wire up against and then you get the reading and according to the sensor it's at about ten thousand you get a reading anywhere between 8 and 18,000 on this sensor that's why we say to set the digital ohmmeter for the 20k range if you do it at the 200 range it'll show up as a zero and then you'll think your thermostat sensor is bad when it really isn't so remember 20k range and don't hold the wires on with your hands for the placement of the thermostat sensor we want to make sure that it's about six inches into an open looped area of the mat now if you take a look here you can see this is the open loop this is the closed loop you never want to have the wire going over one of the heating wires you want it to travel between the wires and not touch the eating wires if you do that if you have the sensor had touched the heating sensor wire your floor is not going to work correctly and also what we're going to do is we are going to put this underneath the mat so we don't have that teeter-totter once again on top of the sensor end what we're going to do is we're going to mark the location of this we're going to peel this back and place this and a small divot in the cord alright so now I've seen where the sensor is going to end up being and what I want to do is I want to get a place here in a small divot in the cork the secret to placement here those I don't want the sensor head to rest on the concrete slab underneath because then the system will stay on all the time because this lab is going to be colder than the flooring so what we do is we just dig out some of this cork so the sensor will lay in a small divot but not on the concrete slab itself after doing this you want to make sure that you clean all this area out because you don't want to create a pinch point that might pinch the wire so I'm going to clean all this loose cork out and then I'm going to tape this sensor in place in the small divot that I made in the cork once again you're not going all the way through down to the concrete slab you're just getting it deep enough that it will stay under and in place and I always tape it down as it comes out that way it's going to hold it in place to make sure that it doesn't contact either the wires that it passes nearby I'm going to now mark the location to this wire because I'm going to trench out a very small groove for the wire to get back to the wall I never ever run the sensor wire next to the high-voltage wire that's supplying power to the mat because it will throw off your thermostat readings also when this enters the wall you want to make sure that the high power wire goes up the conduit and if your local code requires the second conduit for the low voltage wire it goes in a separate conduit however some local codes don't require low voltage wiring to be done in conduit so this would be in conduit and this wire would be loose not in the same conduit as the high voltage wire 

Now we're ready to install the flooring you see I've gotten started here if you'd like to see how to install the wiring to the thermostat we have that in a separate video but if you need any more information about how to lay this product out please check us out at WarmlyYours.com or give us a call at (800) 875-5285