Learn How to Install Electric Floor Heating with Luxury Vinyl Tile

Hello Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Lynn. I am a customer service representative here at WarmlyYours. And today I am joined by Scott. I coincidentally work at WarmlyYours also. Thanks for joining us. Would you look at that? And Scott works with our tech department. So we are going to today be going over installing electric floor heating underneath luxury vinyl tile or luxury vinyl planks. If you have any questions on the presentation today, please don't hesitate to ask. You can do so either in that sidebar chat or at the bottom of the screen that there is an ask a question module. You can type it there. If we don't see your questions immediately, we'll get to them for sure by the end of the presentation today. So like I said, we're today we're going to be going over floor heating. We're kind of going to be talking about floor heating a little bit in general. And then specifically when you will be installing LVP over the top of it. We'll also be showing an example project where someone used our floor heating cable to heat underneath LVP. It will go over that installation process step by step, and then at the end we'll also go over a breakdown of the cost for that specific project that someone that did that project was me. So I've got I've got all the info on that. Love it. Awesome So and then maybe you can tell us. I know LVP is becoming really, really popular. Can you tell us why or what's the draw to it? Well, it's cost effective, for one thing, in the last a long time. Those are the two biggies. Along with those benefits, there are caveats that you have to have to take note of. It does last a long time, but they do have requirements and say you cannot heat above a certain temperature or the heat cannot be within a certain amount of distance from the vinyl planking. And the flooring has to be a really flat to do that. So because of those reasons, we install the product as shown coming up and we've designed this installation method. So you will have a very good chance of complying with the warranty of your product. So those are the benefits and those are the things you have to look out for. Yeah, absolutely. So when you're looking at putting floor heating beneath LVP, you really want to look for a product that can be embedded. So you'd be looking for our zone product, whether that's our flex roll or our cable, any of the time zone products can be embedded. And then from there you'll put the floor over the top of that, and we'll be getting into that in just a moment. Can you kind of tell us why you would want to steer clear of Environ? And on that same note, kind of why Environs often looked at, you know, people often interchange laminate and vinyl and it kind of gets confusing. So can you kind of tell us the difference? Yeah laminate and vinyl are nowhere near the same thing when it comes to installing floor heating under it. Embedding accomplishes one of the requirements of most manufacturers, and that is the fact that many of them in their installation manual says the heat has to be separated from the heat by a half an inch. So that's where we recommend a half inch or a little bit more of self leveling. 3/8 to a half an inch just depends on where you are. And that is going to give you a couple of things. It's going to get you the depth that's required by the installation manual because of embedding, because right in the manual will say embedded in the manual usually. And the second thing is it gives you the flat surface that you're going to need to install. Environ is this floating installation where it just floats on top of a pad and under a flooring. But the thing is, LVP has something we're going to talk about in a little bit, and that is drape. And drape is a very bad match to something that is not flat underneath it. And we're going to talk about that here in a little bit. So even though people see os.Environ is for floating floors and LVP is usually a floating application, Environ is not for LVP. Temps don't covered with self-leveling. Nice flat surface 1/2 inch thickness. Going to give you your compliance to give you a good warranty on the product. Awesome perfect. So kind of looking at that crossbar section, this is obviously like we mentioned, we're going to be using cable in the application, we'll be talking about today. So this is a really good way to see exactly how that gets laid out and in what order. So you'd start by laying out the cable right on the subfloor, and then you'll want to tape it down with that masking tape. You'll put that self-leveling over the top and then the LV out. And we're going to be getting kind of into a little bit more detail on each of these in just a moment. Yeah the thing is, with the reason for the masking tape, the only reason it's really required is because of the self-leveling. Self-leveling is very, very dense. It flows, but it's very dense and the cable is going to want to float to the top and you do not want the cable to float to the top. So when we're talking to people on the phone and they're getting ready to do their installation, we repeatedly give them the facts that you need to keep the cable or the other heating product attached to the subfloor. If you don't, it'll rise to the top of the self-leveling and then you'll have to do it again, which you don't want to do, because you're going to be running against height differences and height problems with doors opening and stuff like that. So you really have to take note and keep that cable or mesh product attached to the subfloor very, very well. Otherwise you're going to be running into trouble. Also you're going to the first step. You're going to ask the people that make the leap. Is it warranted? Does it have a warranty with radiant floor heating? We know that electric floor heating is much better than hot water because hot water overshoots and under shoots. It's a roller coaster. It goes it gets hot and it gets cool. It gets hot and it gets cool. Where with electric heat you can make it. You can set it for temperature and it will stay within a half a degree forever until you change it. So there is no roller coaster overshooting, undershooting, overshooting, undershooting. There's none of that with electric heat. Absolutely and yeah, we have a question here. I can't really. Ah, the print is so small. Really asking this product be used for hardwood floor. Yes we have a video of another job that I did of this actual cable under a hardwood floor. So we have a video for that. If you'd like, you can contact us. We'll send you a link to that. Or you can go to warmlyyours.com and hit the Explore button at the top and then choose videos and then just key in the word hardwood and it'll show you exactly how it does. That only thing you choose differently on the hardwood job is that you put sleepers here and you put sleepers here, and you nail the hardwood down to the sleepers, but you still have the cables and the self-leveling cement between the sleepers. So you have a nice flat surface to nail your hardwood down. So great question. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So looking at look, we had touched on earlier laminate versus vinyl. Obviously, laminate is in vinyl. You usually are the terms are used interchangeably. But like we had said, you really want to make sure that specifically which product you're working with. So that you're going to be doing the correct installation. So can you tell us about what we're looking at here and kind of what the importance of embedding is? This is drape, this is what LVP does. It's called drape. And it it sinks. And it even if it says hard, says a stone core or rock core or rigid core, anything like that. Every single one of those that I've seen, if you put it on in this picture, it'll eventually go up and it'll drop. And what it does, it just conforms to whatever is under it. So you can tell usually on an LVP job, if an LVP job has been put over an existing floor that had some ridges in it, eventually you'll see those ridges in the floor. And it's the same thing with the Environment. The Environment is a floating product, but you can see there's a raised portion everywhere the wire goes, and eventually that LVP is going to conform to that wire and you're going to see bumps in the wire. And that is not going to be a very attractive look. So that's where the drape comes in. And it's a very, very important factor. And this is one of the main reasons we talked about if you already warranty distance from the wire flatness requirements, that's why Environment can't be used really because of the flatness requirements. It it does this. So the thing is going to curve over the top of it. So you want to check and see if your product can be used with radiant heat. You want to find out if it needs embedded. And also you're going to need to find out the maximum temperature and stuff like that. But this is drape and this is what happens no matter what's under the floor, be IT Environment or a flooring that's already there, an old tile floor where you've got deep grooves or the Grout line, you're going to see that eventually over time. Yeah, absolutely. So when you're looking at picking out an LRV, when you want to add radiant heat beneath it, you want to make sure that you're finding one that has no backing or very minimal backing. So you'll look for an assembled Plank that has an r-value of less than 1. What other questions should they be talking to the manufacturer about or what other kind of things should they be looking for? First of all, do they allow radiant heating of any kind? That's going to be the main thing because you don't want to use that product if they don't allow radiant heat. Also, if you have a foam backing, if you have a caulk backing, those are both insulators. They're both cork is as a natural insulator and it's designed to keep heat from passing through it. So the last thing you want to do is put something on the bottom of your LVP that's not going to let the heat through. So that's why the value of one or less is the best thing. If you can find a manufacturer that says our LVP has an R value of 0.6. Oh, cool, you're golden. That stuff is fantastic. It'll work with no problem. If you have an LVP Plank with a 1/4 inch thickness underlayment or one with a 1/16, you're going to choose the lesser of the two evils. You're going to choose the thinner one because that's going to let more heat through. So the last thing you want to do is spend all this time and money to do this installation, then put a product over the top that won't let the heat out. So that's coming from. So also, you're going to want to find out what the maximum temperature is allowed. Some say 82 degrees, some say 85, some say 80, whatever. But the good thing about our product is with our thermostat, we can keep it at exactly that temperature. There's no overshooting or undershooting, as with hot water, so we can keep it right at the temperature that the customer desires as long as it maintains the requirement from the company. And the last thing you want to ask is, does this company allow setbacks at night? Which means here's your comfort temperature of 82. Can I set it down to 70 at night? That's 12 degree difference from nighttime to the heated portion. Is that. OK, some light manufacturers will say there's no setback allowed. You can set it to 82. And it can ulnarly deviate by one or two or three degrees per day. So you can't do a setback. Then you can go from 82 to 79 maybe. But is it really worth it? So you need to find out. Is is a setback allowed or not? Because if it is not allowed, that's going to determine what kind of thermostat you get. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit to. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good point. So looking at the overview of this project, again, they use that time zone cable. They did a 240 volt cable, the total area of the room that was being heated as 161.5 square feet and about 132.2 of those were heated. So the total wattage for the project, 1973 watts eight amps, and it requires just one and 240 volt non fi, 15 amp breaker. So for this specific project, for this room and location, you're looking at about $0.09 an hour to heat that whole space. And if you're heating it first eight hours a day, maybe it's a home office or living room, something like that, where you spend about a third of the day, you'd be looking or about a quarter. I shouldn't try to do math. You'd be looking at about $0.72 for the entire day to really heat that space, which is I think there's a common misconception that electric floor heating is expensive or inefficient. And really that is not very accurate, $0.72 to really have that nice comfortable floor for the whole day. Yeah, a couple of things stream to me on this slide. First of all is we usually only heat about 80% of a room because you never, ever heat right up to the edges. Now, I shouldn't say never, but 99,999 times out of 10,000, you don't heat up to the edge of the room. So whenever you're doing a space, usually assume about 80% coverage. So if you have 100 square foot room, you're going to say, I need about 80 square feet of heating. It's always going to be that, especially in bathrooms where you have toilets and tubs and vanities and that sort of stuff. When it all works out, you're heating about 80% of it, not 100% of it, and sometimes less depending on the size of your tub. Or if you have a tub and a shower or you have a whole bunch of different things going on in there, so usually about 80% And the other thing that screams to me from the technical side is as soon as you talk to an electrician and they say, I'm going to put floor heating in, they immediately go, you need to 40 and you do not need to 40 every single time. That's a very, very common problem. And we run into people who buy 120 volt systems and their electrician just assumes to 40. They hook it up to the 240 and it blows it to bits because you're sending twice the amperage down to a product that's only looking for 120, you're sending 240 to it. So it either gets really, really hot and fails in a day or two or it just doesn't come on at all. So the reason why 240 is chosen here is because with 120 volt we choose to use 120 volt between one between 0 and 120 square feet. You can do that on a 15 amp breaker with a the I'm sorry, on a 20 amp breaker with the thermostat because the thermostat switches 15 amps in 120 or to 40. The thing about 240 is it lets you double the space to heat. So if you have a small bathroom, you do not need 240 volt, you only need 120 volts because 120 volt single breaker. That's the main thing. How many breaker spaces do you have in your breaker panel? If you only have one breaker space, you're not going to be taking something out so you can put a dual pole to 40 volt breaker in. You're going to want to use that one space. And if you have one under 120 square feet, you can use 120. The reason why we didn't use 120 volts here is because it is over 120 volts, over 120 square feet. It's 132. So that means it's going to be 16 or 17 amps and a thermostat can't handle that. It can only handle 15. So that's why we went to 240, not because it's any better. That's an old, old wives tale. 240 is not better than 120 when it comes to floor heating. So just a couple of things there. I wondered because we get these questions all the time, I need to 40 I need to know you don't need to 40 and how much do I need to plan on? 80% is usually where it falls out, sometimes a little bit less, sometimes a little bit more. Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good point. I hear that a lot. That's still a very common misconception, so it's good to clear that up. So looking at testing the system, since obviously you're putting concrete over the top of it, you want to make sure that you're going to be putting down a working system that's going to be more or less permanently installed. So what you'll want to use is an O meter as well as a circuit check. And can you kind of tell us what those are and how they'll be testing? The o meter is not optional. You need the O meter to record your ohms before you install it in the middle of your installation. And at the end and you write those numbers down in your installation manual and the warranty card with the ohms numbers you get at the end. These digital meters, when I was a kid, a digital o meter was $200 or $300. Now they're $8. So you don't need to get a really fancy one. This one pictured here was, I believe, 1999 at any big box store. And that is. That is a very, very important part of your testing the circuit check. What it does is you can't be holding the wires. You can't be holding the probes on your meter onto the wire the whole time because you have to get over there and install it. Right so you have to. You have to. OK I've got to let go of this meter. Oh, what do I do? Well, what you do is you put the circuit check on and the circuit check is a continuity checker, and it makes sure there's three wires inside. I don't know if you can see my fingers or not, but inside there are three wires. Two of the wires are heating wires and one of the wires is the ground. So what it's doing is it's making sure that there's no continuity. It's only time we use the word continuity between the ground and one of the heating wires. And it's also making sure that you have a circuit across the two heating wires. So if you cut that wire. Now all you have is a ground and one of the heating wires. There's no circuit there. There's no heat. So that's what it's doing. It's making sure that you have a heating circuit intact. And it's also making sure that you don't have any connection between ground and one of the heating wires. So those are how those two things work together. And we have videos on our website that show exactly how to do that test. So we do have a question right now. Will the cycling of temperatures cause the LVP to separate or heave? That is being determined by the manufacturer and they're going to tell you whether they allow a set back temperature or not. So if they say, you know, we're really worried about that, you need to set it to 82 and leave it there, then you can do that. That's no problem. You just have to follow their instructions. It's not up to us. It's up to the volatility of that vinyl product that the manufacturer is made and they can tell you how reactive to heat that it is. So that's a couple of things. And part of the reason of getting the heating wire embedded is not only the distance from the wire to the LV is it adds some thermal mass. You have to heat the thermal mass. And the thermal mass doesn't go from 60 degrees to 90 in 2 seconds. It's a very slow heat. It slows up, it goes up slowly and it stays there, then it drops slowly. So you're not going to go 90, 79, 70. You're going to go 70, 71, 72, 73. It's a very slow, uneven heat. So you don't have to worry about wild swings, but you may have a wild swing in the middle of the night when it's really cold out and you've gone from 85 degrees down to 68, and they will tell you whether they'll allow you to do that or not. So great question, Scott. Yes, absolutely. So the project will be going over today is a second floor bedroom in killdeer, Illinois, which is right outside Chicago. So obviously it does get quite cold. So can we kind of see exactly what this project looks like? So there you go. This is what was sent in to us for a layout plan. So can you kind of tell us what we're looking at here and why? This is a pretty good example of a project sketch. So the thing this is a great example. And it's going to come down to asking more questions. And because we want to make sure that you have the correct stuff and we want to make sure that it's installed correctly so it doesn't fail on you. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that, first of all, I see a closet here at the bottom. National electric code doesn't allow heating and closets. So I know that we're not going to be heating that area. And also, the question we're going to have to ask is these look like dressers up here and here is a bed. We need to ask the homeowner, is the bed staying there forever? Is it ever going to move? Because if it's never going to move, there's no reason to heat under it. So we can save some money in installation and operation costs by just heating this area out in front. Well, this homeowner said, well, yes, sometimes the bed may go over here and the dressers go over here. OK, that's fine. So what things do I have to look for when it comes to dressers and beds? No boxed bottoms. They need to be up on legs. And why would they need to be up on legs so they don't trap heat? If you get a box bottom and you put it on a heated area, it's going to trap the heat and it's going to cause it to overheat. And that's why when you do a bed, you can do a bed without any problem. Make sure the bed is on legs, not one of those beds that have drawers underneath. And when it is on legs, make sure the dust ruffle doesn't go all the way to the floor. So if it's a bed like mine, there are seven foot wide dust bunnies underneath my bed because it never moves. But sometimes some homes do move the bed and they deal with those dust bunnies and then they, they, they move the bed. So that's where a case where you would heat the entire space if the bed moves from one location to another, you want to heat the entire thing. If it stays in the same place every time, there's a really no need to heat under that bed. So we have dimensions there always. And you can see this sketch is not a work of art, but it has the dimensions on it and that's what we need to know. How long is the room, how wide is the room and what other items are in the room that we need to measure around air vents? People forget to mark air vents on the floor, because you can't heat over an air vent, especially if you're in a basement, you can't heat a support pole. You have to take that area out of the available square footage. Well, if you have a support pole here, another support pole over there, and 6 vents along the wall, all of a sudden you've gone from 100 square feet down to 80 because all those things take up square feet. So you can't buy 100 square foot product. You have to buy one that's 80 or less. So that's what we need to know. Air vents, beds, dressers, dressers are OK as long as they're on legs. Awesome points. Thank you, Scott. So when you're looking at a smart plan that you've received from us, it'll usually look something like this. We can normally turn smart plans around within about a business day. So once you send in that initial sketch, we'll send it back to you a drawing that is drawn to scale full color. And you can see exactly where you'll be putting the heat, how it'll be laid out, the spacing and everything like that. So take a look at this drawing. This drawing has a lot of good information on it. It has a red dot on it. It has a T And a circle in it there along the left side. Along the left side, also, you'll see measurements in green like 5 and 3/4 measurements along the top where it says 14 feet, three inches, but then they're inside the Green thing. It says 13, 3 and 1/2 inches. If you look on the right side, it says 13.8. But there is these numbers 5 and 3/4 on both of those things, though, those green numbers tell you how far on the left and right the fixing strips get mounted to the floor from the wall. If you get them too far away from the wall, all of a sudden, you're going to have a bunch of extra cable. Well, how can if you have a bunch of extra cable before you actually get to the end? That's where this think comes in handy. That's this red dot. This red dot is a actual white dot on the cable and it says this is the halfway mark. So if you are doing this installation, look here we have a T in a circle. That's the thermostat. We have a triangle that's the beginning of the cable and we have a square. That's the end. We know that this fixing strip has to be mounted 5 and 3/4 inches away from the wall. We go over here and we find out that it needs to be 5 and 3/4 inches away from the wall over here. And we know that there will be a gap here shown with this number. And also this number in green is actually the run of the cable, not the width of the wall. So those are the things you're going to look at. And if you get to the point where you've reached the White dot down over here, it tells you you've used way too many feet of cable. If you don't get to the White dot until you get to the top over here, it tells you you've spaced it too wide. So if you take a look at the bottom, it says each run spaced at 3 inches. So if you go up 4 inch spacing, this white dot will be over here. If you go at 2 inch spacing, you're going to overheat and your dot will be over here. So it's much better to find that out halfway through the job than to get all the way at the end to go, oops, I've got about 70 feet of extra cable. Well, not if you paid attention to that white dot and measured it in relation to the red dot on your plan. So that's what's so good about these installation plans. If you've never done one of these floors before, don't try to figure it out on your own. Just send us the drawing with the dimensions. And we'll tell you what size product goes in there, because you can't just buy a gigantic spool, run it in the room and then cut the end off. You can't do that. It's a constant wattage problem product. You cannot shorten the cable or you cannot lengthen the cable. So that's why it's so important to get the right size. And we'll do that for you. Absolutely and like I said, normally we can do that pretty quickly. So even if it's kind of a rushed job and you have it all of a sudden coming up, let us know. And we can definitely move that a little bit quicker and try to have an answer for you and have a drawing for you pretty quickly. So looking at the installation process, again, cable for LVP with a wood subfloor like we showed earlier in that cross section. So first you want to make sure that you are properly preparing the subfloor. And what that look like, scott? Well, that looks like a bare subfloor to me. That's been covered with primer. And there's also a piece of tape on the floor at the bottom of the photo. I love this photo because what we had to do is we had to get ready for self leveling. When you get ready for self leveling, you have to fill the holes in the floor. Otherwise the self leveling will cause a gigantic vortex that you're going to get sucked down into that hole and go down to the space below. So you don't want that. So you want to plug that hole. So that self leveling is always going to go to the lowest spot and that may be the room below you, so you don't want that, so you plug those holes. Also, what we did is we ran some caulk around the outside edges of the floor that keeps the self-leveling from flowing down the walls, which is very unpretty, and you want to stay away from that. So what we've done then is once we get those things taken care of, we put the primer on the wood and people will ask, well, how, what kind of primer do I use? If you're buying self-leveling on the self-leveling bag, it'll say. You must use this primer, you usually will find the bag of self leveling here and the primer in the shelf above it. It's usually right next to each other at Home Depot or any other big box store. If the bag says that you need primer, then you need primer. There's no way around it because that's going to if you don't use primer, it'll dry too quickly and erratically and you might have problems with that floor later down the line. So always make sure that you get the primer used required on there. Also, there's a difference between self leveling being dry. And self-leveling being cured. Dry and cure are two different things you can have if you use fast setting SLC, which is for our solidified stuff. It's solid in 4 hours, but it's not cured for another seven days or another 14 days or another 28 days. Whatever it says on the bag, it'll say that on the bag to cures in x amount time because you don't want to turn on the floor heat until it's cured, not when it's dry until it's cured. Now you can put the left over the self-leveling as long as it reaches a certain point of dryness. It doesn't have to cure, but it just has to be a certain amount of dryness, a certain percentage of moisture or below. Then you can go and put the self-leveling on the top. So that may mean you need to wait till tonight or you need to wait till tomorrow, or you might need to wait till the day after before you can put the self-leveling just depends on how humid is humid. It is In that space on that particular day. So those are the things you need to watch out for when you're working for self-leveling. And if you're doing one of these jobs in a bigger room, have somebody help you. They can mix the self-leveling and walk it up to you while you're pouring it out. Now this is turning into a self leveling class. I hope you don't mind, Lynn, but I just want to go one more thing. And as soon as you say as soon as you say self leveling to flooring professionals, they think, OK, I got to bring my spiked shoes. I have to bring my leveler rake with the leveler rods to make sure I get it a certain thickness. You can't use either one of those with this job. You you have to use a squeegee and you have to use your regular shoes because you cannot. If you've got a pair of spike shoes and you walk across this floor, your floor is toast. It will never, ever work because you're going to damage it. And the last thing you want is a gauge rake, because then you take the gauge out of the rake like that and then you pull it across and guess what you're doing? You're pulling all the cable up off the floor. So that's why you can't use either one of those things. So make sure the self leveling people go, oh, you're right. Oh, I better not because we did have somebody about two or three months ago, where is spike shoes? And now they wondered why the floor didn't work anymore. Oh, that's a shame tale. Yeah, Yeah. Especially I think we, we don't say it a ton, but it definitely it should be said more. If you're installer has any questions, always give them our number and let them to reach out to us. You know, don't feel like you have to try to retain all that information and remember to tell them everything. Everything should be in the installation manual, but we're also available. We do 24/7 tech support. So if your installer ever has questions beforehand or on the job site, let them to give us a call and we can help walk them through it. Exactly so looking at the cable installation, then, which is the next step, you'll be laying out the fixing strips on that subflow and you'll make sure you want to make sure that they're attached very well. So depending on the subfloor, depending on preference, you can use either screws, concrete, nails or double sided tape to keep those fixing strips secured. And then from there, you'll lay out the cable according to your smart plan making note of like you had mentioned earlier, Scott, the halfway points on that smart plan to ensure that you are going to be running it properly and with the correct spacing. So be sure to be following along looking at that smart plan and kind of keeping an eye on everything as you go. Right and the one thing that we don't see here yet, because we're not done is this is the masking tape every two feet a row of masking tape across there to hold it down. Absolutely good call. So if you were to be doing a TempZone™ flex role for the installation instead of the loose cable, same thing. We'll give you a smart plan for it so you don't ever have to worry about trying to piece it together or figuring it out on your own. However, your it's going to look a little bit different. Obviously, it is a cable that's attached to a mesh, so it gets laid out a little bit different. Can you kind of tell us things to keep an eye out for when using a flex role? Yeah, cable side down. We get that question 10 times a day every single day of the year. We try to do it for cable side down because when you attach the mesh to the subfloor, the cable can't go up because it's under the mesh. So if the mesh is holding it down, the cable has nowhere to go. And if you turn it so the mesh is facing down and the cable facing up on the edges, you'll see the loops rise to the top of the self-leveling and you'll see these little dents every three inches apart. And those are where the wires, because they put the wire side up, it's bent like this because that wire wants to go to the top of the port. So you're going to see those. That's why it's always cable side down as much as possible. And to keep the mesh in place, you can use hot glue. That's the best thing to use. But you can also use staple guns and staples, but you never, ever staple over the wire. If your installer says, yeah, I'm going to use some staples to hold this wire down here, but I won't put it down all the way. Guess what? The guy that's putting the self-leveling in steps on that. On that staple that was above the wire. And now all of a sudden that staple has gone into the wire. Never, ever allow a staple to pass over a wire. The staple can go in the mesh. That's fine. And remember, you want to attach that. If you're going to use staples going through the mesh, then you want to do that every five or six inches everywhere because that's going to keep the whole thing from floating to the top. And don't skimp on that. We talk to people. We warn them, say, make sure you do this and they'll call us the next day. Go yeah, I've got a couple of places where it's rising, where it's risen to the top. And we don't like to say, I told you so, but here's how you can fix that. You can you're going to have to do another pore of self leveling to make sure that stuff is embedded. So you have to watch out for that. So that's very, very important. Absolutely Yeah. I always feel like I cringe when you talk about all those different options where things can go bad because we see it so often and you just want to make sure that you really are just taking a little bit of extra caution when doing this installation. We'll go a really, really long way. So looking at the floor sensor stage of the installation, can you tell us where you find that, first of all, and where you should be installing it? The sensor is in the thermostat box, so don't just take the thermostat thermostat box, go. OK I can put this in later. And here's the floor heating cable and such for the installer. You need to open up the thermostat box, take the thermostat out and take the sensor wire at the bottom and give it to the tiler so they can get it installed like you see here. Now, I splurged a couple of months ago and I paid for YouTube without ads. So I can spend eight hours a night looking at these type of videos where people put here's how to install a floor and you'll watch them on YouTube. And invariably I see installers running the thermostat sensor out into the middle of the room. You don't need to do that. You only need to run the thermostat sensor about 6 to 8 inches on the open loop. So if you look here, you can see here is a faint outline of where the cable is. It makes a loop and goes around. We're running the cable, the thermostat sensor cable here over this area where there is no loop. And we're running at about 6 inches into the edge. That's all the further it needs to go, because the further you get it out into the middle of the room, the more chance you have of sunlight hitting it. And you do not want the sensor to be somewhere where the sun will hit it because the sun will warm that spot. The thermostat will go, hey, the floor is warm. I don't need to supply any heat, but that spot is nice and warm where the sun's hitting it. But the rest of the floor is 55 degrees. That's why you need to make sure that you put the sensor in an area that the sun never hits. So it's very, very important. Another common mistake that people make is running the sensor wire in the same conduit as the non heating leads. You don't want to do that. First of all, it's against code. And second of all, the high voltage will obliterate the signal coming from the low voltage and your system won't work. So if you want to put in a backup sensor, you can do so. You can put one of them here where it is in this open loop. And then you could go to this open loop over here and put the second one if you wanted to, but they never both get attached at the same time. Only one sensor could be attached to the thermostat at once. And you know how I can tell when people have attached both sensors to the thermostat? They will call up and say, my thermostat says 140 degrees and my system isn't even on. Well, the reason why it's 140 degrees is because they have both sensors attached. And the ohms readings are wrong because all the thermostat sensor is doing is sending varying amounts of Ohm's to the thermostat. If you wire 2 of them together, the ohms are going to be way off and the temperature is going to be way off. So if you have a floor that's 140 degrees, even with a turned off, you have a pretty good candidate for a system that has two sensors attached to the back of the thermostat. Leave one of them disconnected, ball it up and put it in the back in the box and leave it in case you ever need it. Absolutely luckily, that is an easy fix. If that is what is going on, you can pretty quickly change that out, unhook the one and you'll be pretty much back up and running. Exactly so then you'll be obviously, like we had said, once you have the masking tape or staples or whatever you are using to secure those that heating to the subfloor again, every two to three feet, making sure that it's secured very well, then you'll begin laying out your self-leveling cement. So how thick should this end up being at the end? Usually around a half an inch. That way we can comply with the one half inch embedding requirement of the LV manufacturers saying the heat needs to be a half an inch away and embedded. So you're killing two birds with one stone here. I apologize to any ornithologists who may have been offended by my statement, but we need to watch out for that. Make sure that is nice and smooth. Make sure that you're using a squeegee, not a rake here. And this is where you're going to be concerned because you're wearing regular shoes. You're not going to be walking around in the self-leveling. So you're going to be working on one corner on the opposite side and working your way back towards the doorway so you can escape. So that's where it's important to plan that because you're not going to be walking over the top of it. You're going to be pulling it, pouring the self-leveling using a squeegee to flatten it out. And then you're going to be moving back further and further doing that. So usually a half inch, half inch is easy to measure. It complies with the requirements of that. And you're going to not have to worry about your product floating to the top because it will. If you don't attach it very well, it will float to the top. So you have to watch out for that. It's awesome, but don't forget to test it before you cover it because we've tested it right out of the box with our own meter. Now, before we cover it with self-leveling, we want to make sure that it tests good. If it tests good, then you can put your circuit check back on and start working with the self-leveling over the top. Absolutely that's a very good point. So from there, once everything is level and the self leveling has been put down, then you can really begin installing that. So can you kind of tell us what you're doing at this stage? Is your waiting? A lot of flooring pros have a moisture meter that they'll stick into the self-leveling to see if it's dry enough to put it on there. Once again, it's not cured. It's just dry enough for the LVP to put over the top. So once it's dried enough, you can then start covering it and you would install it just like you would over wood subfloor that wasn't heated. So make sure that you acclimate that. Make sure if it says, hey, you need to have it in your house for six days before you install it, then make sure you do that Follow the instructions on your LVP at this point. Because at this point it's just an LVP installation over a heated subfloor. Yes, exactly. And then from there, once that is, you know, everything's hooked up, you have the thermostat all wired ready to go. Then you'll begin setting up your thermostat. And one of the first things it's going to ask you is to set a maximum temperature. And we've touched on this quite a few times now, but you again want to be checking with that flooring manufacturer to know of any maximum temperature limits that they have, as well as any types of setback, limitations or concerns, things like that. So you just want to make sure that you are setting that up. So that you are really setting yourself up for success. You know what people love? People love nest thermostats and people love love. It's too bad they can't be used together because they really should never be used together. And the reason why I say that is because LVP usually has a maximum temperature that the floor can get to. And the way our thermostat knows that is because the thermostat sensor is embedded in the floor. The nest doesn't have an input for a floor sensor. It cannot control the temperature of the floor. So if you're using a Nest thermostat and you set it to 80 degrees, there is a chance that your floor could get 100 degrees trying to make the room warm because there's no sensor in the floor to help you comply with your warranty. So if you ever had a warranty claim and you go, yeah, I've got floor heat here and I've got LVP and I've got this other thermostat. May not be a nest, it may be some other brand that doesn't have an input for a floor sensor. They're going to go, well, look at you've never controlled the temperature of your floor because there's no way to control the temperature of your floor because you're using a thermostat that is ambient only, which means air temperature. So that's why you have two fantastic products that can never be used together because that could be a problem. Whereas you can heat a tile floor to 100 degrees, 104 degrees, whatever, you're not going to damage it. It doesn't have a maximum temperature requirement. Well, LVP does. And it needs to be treated that way. And that's why you do this and you set it up. So you're going to have a choice. When you do this setup of your thermostat, either using ambient sensor or floor, you always have to use floor. Awesome and then looking at the wiring, this definitely is your Forte more than my and Scott. So can you kind of tell us what we're looking at here? Yeah, that is a Groovy picture. And if you take a look at it, you see a single gang box with two conduits going to the floor. This is the National Electric Code favorite way to do it. A conduit for every wire and every wire for a conduit. But if you take a look, the one conduits for the non heating lead of the product to go up to the thermostat. And the other one is for the sensor. The sensor. It depends on your locality. Your sensor is a low voltage wire. It may not be into conduit at all, but in Chicago it is low voltage wires have to be in conduit too, because the whole town burned down 150 years ago. So when your entire city is in flames, you kind of take notice of that stuff. So since the city burned down, Chicago has that. So it must be that way. But the non heating leads are high voltage, the sensor wires low voltage. They are not allowed to go in the same conduit. So that's what you're seeing there. You're seeing conduit, you're seeing a non fi breaker sending power to the power source that at the top comes down. Usually this is how it's set up. It usually comes down to the thermostat box and then wires go from the floor, come up to the thermostat box. Your your results may vary. And so may your experience, but that's where you make sure that the non heating leads never in the same conduit as the low voltage. Awesome So you kind of mentioned earlier that we'd be touching on some of our different thermostat options and what may be best for each project. So this is a really good diagram kind of showing you at a glance the different options that we do have available and the different offerings that each one gives you. So can you kind of tell us maybe what preferred thermostat is best for lvd? Yeah, well, it's kind of the same for all of our most valuable floors besides really expensive marble. So if you have hardwood or you do laminate or carpet, carpet requires special temperatures to if you're allowed to in the United states, you can install floor heating under carpeting. You can't in Canada, but the most expensive floor is usually require the least expensive thermostat because the least expensive thermostat is going to be this one over here with all the red marks. And what that is a set it and forget it thermostat. You set it to 82 and it'll stay at 82 forever until you change it. So that's how with hardwood that says it needs to be a certain temperature, you cannot do any setbacks at the beginning of the year. You have to ramp it up from 60 degrees up to 82. So that may take three degrees per day. So that may take three or four or five days to go from 68 up to 82, depending on your spread there. And the same thing in the fall. I mean, same thing in the spring. When you're turning your system off, you just don't go from 85 to 68. You go 85 to 79, 79 to 76, 76 to 73 and work your way down. And that's how you accomplish everything with that and trust thermostat, the one on the right. If they do allow setbacks, then that opens up the whole spectrum to you and you can use a programmable thermostat if you want. Perfect and looking at our different programmable models, there are quite a few different options. So if you need help deciding on specifics, absolutely reach out and let us know. We can definitely help you figure out which model will be best. Yeah the good thing about the wi, one of the newest updates on the Wi-Fi thermostat, it works with Alexa and Google. So you can say, hey, Alexa, turn on the floor heat to 78 degrees and it'll do it for you. So it's got that built into it. So that's a great thing when it comes to that type of control, if you want to use the Wi-Fi. And this is the finished room that looks beautiful. So I think you did a great job, Scott. Thanks I didn't do all of it, but we were there and we were all working together on it. And, you know, teamwork makes the dream work. So that's how we got that all installed there. And it looks fantastic. And even though the closet doesn't have any heat in it, it still has a half inch layer of self-leveling in it. So the floor is the same height all the way across. So that's how you establish that good flow from one area to the other. So along the left side, you're going to find that there are cabinets there up on legs are chests, that sort of stuff. And then the bed was directly under the window. In this particular case. So it does look fantastic. Let's talk about money. I'd rather not, but I guess we can. So looking at the cost for this, this is all the MSRP pricing. So if you are a trade professional, usually we can also get you a discounted price. So be sure to reach out to us and get your trade professional discount set up. But for just kind of looking at pricing purposes, the cable used is the 240 volt 595 linear foot cable. We use that inspired touch thermostat with Wi-Fi capabilities. This one can be controlled through an app on the phone as well as on the thermostat itself. And then of course, we also have the circuit check that was used and the fixing strips for a grand total of just about 1,500 dollars. Yeah and we have another question. Is, where does the backup sensor conduit go? You don't need a separate conduit for the backup sensor. The backup sensor and the main sensor can both go in the same conduit with each other. As long as that's not what the high voltage lead. So great question on that. Absolutely Thank you. So if there's any other questions that you have, feel free to send them in to us right now. I know that we have gotten a few that were sent in beforehand, so we'll be going over some of those now. I thought I had it pulled up right here, but I guess I don't. The first one is just want to know what happens to the heating elements when a floating floor moves. And hopefully we've learned that at the very beginning is the heating elements don't move because they are embedded in self-leveling and the floating floor moves along the top of the self-leveling. So it never the wires never in jeopardy. So Thank you, Scott, for sending that in. And then Wendell says, can this be applied on top of an existing vinyl floor? That would be problematic to remove, maybe, and definitely not. If you have a vinyl floor that is just attached around the perimeter, sometimes they'll do a big sheet and they'll just glue around the outer edges. That cannot be done. It needs to be completely attached to the subfloor. So if you have any bubbles or anything under there, you're going to have to remove that vinyl floor. Also, if you have the type of vinyl floor that's padded, like the padded vinyl floor, those cannot be heated over either. That will need to be replaced. Otherwise, if you have very good vinyl floor, that is very solid, you just need to find the correct self-leveling cement to be used over that type of slippery surface. And then you can use that to embed the cable and you should be good to go. Awesome Renee says how many additional electrical circuits are needed for heated floors in the living room or bedroom? Well, first of all, we always strongly, strongly recommend that a thermostat goes in each area with radiant heating, electric floor heating like this. You never want to heat the entire house all at the same time. So you need to get your head away from. Well, my old system, my Old Forester system has a thermostat in the living room. And it creates heat for the entire space. That's because it's forced air. It comes from one central space and then blows everywhere this product. So you're heating areas that you're not even in. The good thing about electric floor heating is if you're going to be in the living room every day, you make sure the living room is heated. If you have electric floor heat in a bedroom that's never used except for holidays, there's no reason to turn it on. So there's no reason to heat that space. So you're saving money there. Also, if you put it in the basement, you're only there three times a year. Christmas, New Year's Eve. And then sometime in the summer. Then you turn it on there. You don't want all these areas that don't get used every day to be heated every day. So you need to just have a circuit for each thermostat. Remember, you can heat up to 120 square feet on one thermostat with 120 volts. You can also do up to 240 square feet for up to 200 on 240 volts. And if you have areas larger than that, then we do have power modules which are controlled by the thermostat. So you have the thermostat powering one area for 15 amps and the power module powering another area for 15 amps. And you can just add power modules as you go. So if you have a really big basement, you can heat all of them at the same time using a thermostat and one, two or three power modules. So each power module, each control needs its own circuit. So if you have a thermostat in a power module, you need one circuit for the thermostat and one circuit for the power module. So hopefully that answers your question. Awesome and then our last early question is, what is the difference between the time zone, flex roll and os.Environ flex roll underneath the vinyl floor? And also, are there LVP thicknesses that should be avoided? One word. The one word I want to use is drape. That's why you can't use os.Environ flexible because of drape. In a year or two or three or however long it takes, you'll see the lines of the wire of the os.Environ and you may not comply with your warranty because it's not embedded and there's and it's not flat. You're not going to have the flatness requirement for the installation. So you are going to avoid LVP or LVP with os.Environ. Totally you're going to want to use Tipsord flex roll. Thank you, Colleen. Great question. Question that we get every single day. Her other question is, are there LVP thicknesses that should be avoided when using the heating mat? And really, like we had said earlier, the main thing is looking at the R value, making sure the R value of the whole Plank is less than one, right? So if you want to use a thicker one, you can as long as your a value is 1 or less. Absolutely awesome. I'm not seeing any other questions popping up right now. And if you have any more, as we do some housekeeping, be sure to let us know. OK no Facebook. Yeah, no. No questions on Facebook. So that's good to know. OK, very good. So next month, look out for our email. It will be the best webinars from a 2022, so feel free to watch some of those back, learn a little bit more and again, always reach out to us if there's any specific questions on any of our topics, our webinar topics or just kind of for heating in general. Well, if they say the best webinars of 2022, that means, Lynn, that we've done at least one. So congratulations. I want to Pat you on the back for job well done, because at least there is one. It could be the best. So let's keep going. Absolutely it probably today is I think that we did a fabulous job, but I guess we'll see. So also we do daily trainings right here on crowdcast, at least one a day. Often we do two a day. Usually they're hosted by me. They're often hosted by Scott or another member of our technical team. And these are just short, usually five, maybe 10 minute training sessions on a certain topic. And you can always pop in, ask questions on any topic it doesn't need to be that day and just learn a little bit more about our products and installation. And then our promotion for November is 25% off of select towel warmer models. These are really, really good holiday gifts. So be sure to be looking out for those and shopping around on warmly. Transcom pretty shortly after the webinar today, you'll be receiving an email asking about your experience. We would love to hear your feedback. We appreciate any comments, any suggestions, so be sure to let us know what we did. Great if anything, I think we did probably a few things pretty great today. And then if you have any suggestions or, you know, especially topics that you'd like to see in the future, be sure to let us know, and we will take those into consideration. Exactly we don't want to be talking about stuff that has no interest from the people watching it. So if you say, hey, you know what, why don't you guys talk about this? I've never heard anybody talk about this. That's the kind of stuff we're looking for. Otherwise, we'll just throw the dart at the dart board, like when they named the Bay City rollers. And they that's exactly how we'll do it. Sounds like exactly accurate. So looking at contacting us, if you ever have questions, if you want to just chat about an upcoming project, get a smart plan started, anything at all, please reach out. You can give us a call. You can email us. You can email either our general informational email or you can reach out directly to our owner and President Julia billon. She would love to chat with you one on one if you'd like to reach out to her. And of course, anytime, day or night, visit our website for more information on our products, our company. And there's a lot of really great information on that website. All of our past webinars are hosted up there, so you can watch past videos and learn a little bit more about our products. Yeah, there is no Bay City rollers content elsewhere on the website, so don't go there. No to that. Yeah, I wouldn't look for any of the Bay City rollers, but I do think that you probably find that on YouTube, especially if you have YouTube premium's, what night of the week you could find that as a Tuesday, Saturday night. So that would be the day to go to YouTube for that. But I'd like to Thank you for everybody joining us today. Lynn, you did a fantastic job, so Thanks for coming along. Thank you. You as well, Scott. I had a great time. Thank you guys for joining us. And until next time, as always, stay warm and be radiant. Thanks, everybody.