Floor Heating for under Shower Floors & Shower Bench Seats

Hello, today, we're going to talk about putting electric radiant heat in the floor of your shower, not only the floor of your shower, but also the bench. We have a couple of different mats here that we're going to be installing into this shower. In the US, There is no real wet location listing per the National Electric Code. But in Canada, there is, this cable that's included in both of these mats has been tested to the Canadian standard of being wet location listed, which this cable is. So if you're in Canada, you're all set to go ahead and put this in. If you're in the United states, all, you'll want to do is ask your authority having jurisdiction or your local code official if putting electric heat is OK in the shower. So when it comes down to doing the floor of your shower, we have different size mats for standard size shower floors. If for some reason the mat will not fit into your shower floor, you can use our existing roll product, which comes on a spool and you can spool it back and forth. Or you can use cut and turn rolls because all the wire on it is the same thing. So if you notice, the drain is in the center of this. If you have an edge drain or a trough drain, you may not be able to use these prefabricated mats because these prefabricated mats actually have a 5 inch hole in the center that allows you to just place it right over the drain, makes it very easy to install. If we take a look at this roll, this roll is designed specifically for being on the bench. There are a couple of different sizes for the different width of the bench that you'll want to have. So if you're interested in doing your shower bench, because when you sit down, it sure is nice to have something warm to sit on. You just lay it out, put it down and wire it back to the thermostat. And we're to show you how to do that coming up real soon. OK, now we can see that we have concrete down on the shower floor and we're ready to go ahead and place the mat, what we're going to do is we're going to test them first with a digital ohmmeter to make sure that they're good small mats. 

 You may have to set your digital ohmmeter for the range above 200 which in a lot of cases is 2000 because a really small mat will have homes above 200 and they'll show up a zero if you set it to the 200 range on your meter. So what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead, test them again, make sure that, OK, we're going to lay them down. And normally when you lay them down or lay them out on the floor, if we were doing a floor in this entire bathroom, we would put the circuit check on it, because the circuit check is good for if you're walking around on top of the wires or not, we're just going to be laying this down and then covering it. We're not going to be walking over it. So we're just going to test it after we lay it out to make sure it's good, cover it, then test it again to make sure the system is working fine. All right. So now we're ready to test the wire. We're going to put the black on the black and you can hold one of them on, but you can't hold both of them on. So I'm going to hold the black went on to Black. I'm going to put this on yellow. And we should get a reading of about 370 in that ballpark. And we're right there. I'm also going to check from the black wire to the ground to make sure we don't have any reading, that I'm going to go from yellow to ground and we don't have any reading. Remember, yellow and black means that you have a 120 volt mat. So here's the yellow black and here's our ground black, to ground yellow to ground. And then black to yellow here. We're getting ready to put the mat on the bench. When you roll the man out, you want to make sure that the cable's facing Downward. So we're doing that. And we're also creating a spot for the cold lead to go down the wall and over to the thermostat. Now we have the ballpark area of where the mats going to be. We're going to go ahead and hot glue it down to the bench. Right, now that we've got the mat, we've got to glued down, we're going to go ahead and get the lead routed back to the thermostat. So you're going to have to dig out a little bit here to get it down and around. One thing is you want to make sure that you don't really bend it more than 90 degrees. You want to be careful as you do that. But what we're doing is we're going from the splice. You're getting it down the wall and then over to the hole for the thermostat. We've put the mat down and we're starting to get it into place where we want it to be. We have one little issue, though, and that is that the hole that is cut in the center of the mat is a little off of the center of this is because the drain really isn't centered in the shower. It's not the end of the world. The hole is 5 inches. So what we're going to do is we're just going to trim the green mesh back a little bit and maybe pull on the wires a little bit to maybe pull them away from the hole. So you can see here, it may not always match up perfectly, but you can make it work fairly easily. We have the mat put down in place now, and you can see around the drain, we had to trim a little bit of the mesh from around there to make it fit Exactly but that's fine. It looks really good right now. The thing is, you want to make sure that that wire doesn't get too close to the drain because sometimes the drain has a flange that goes out a little bit extra. So you want to make sure that that wire doesn't get trapped under that flange or get hit with any screws. So you always keep an eye on that. You can also see that we ran the cold lead down here along the base of the bench. 

 What we're going to do next is we're going to get our sensor placed into the mat. The one thing you want to make sure that you don't do, that Well, there's two things. Don't put the sensor wire in the same conduit as the high voltage wires and try not to run the sensor wire, which is a low voltage wire right next to a high voltage wire for long spaces of time, for long distances, I should say. It's OK to cross it like this. When you are crossing a cold lead and a sensor wire, you don't want to run the sensor wire right next to the cold lead for long distances because it can throw your readings off. So what we can see right now is we're going to go ahead and we've got the sensor wire about six inches in between the wires, the heating wires, and it runs into an open loop. You want to make sure that your sensor head does not rest against the electric heating wire, otherwise the system will not work correctly. So right between the two and then run the sensor wire. So it's not right next to the high power wire here. You can see we've weaved the wire in through the mesh to help hold it in place. We might put a little piece of hot glue here to help hold it in place permanently. Then we're going to hold it in place here with some hot glue and then run it so it doesn't hit that high power wire as it runs through the shower pan. All right, we have the wire down on the concrete base, we've covered it with one layer of thinset and then we use another layer of thinset to get the correct pitch in here to make sure that the water drains down towards the drain. We just got done installing the drain right now. So it's in, and it's ready. So now we're ready to go ahead and get the tile installed. We can see that the shower is really coming along. Everything has been installed now, but there's one last thing to do and that's the shower bench. So we'll be getting some footage of that and then we'll show you the finished product in just a few minutes. All right, the tradesmen have been here and worked their magic, we've got the base cap in here along the base of the shower. It's been set in silicone and it's been tilted in. So when water hits it, it will come towards the drain. The shower bench has been installed. They've used silicone to set it. They've also used a silicone sealant around the edges. And now it's pitched to have water run down in it towards the drain. So now we have these two pieces in. We'll be back after we get the doors on. Wow, does this bench feel nice and warm? Well, a lot of work has gone into the shower enclosure, but right now we have a nice heated floor and a nice heated bench inside this shower. If you have any more questions about how to get heat in your shower, give us a call at 800 875 5285 or check us out WarmlyYours.com thank you for watching.