Installation Tips for Heated Tile Floors

Alright. I think we are all here. Are you ready, Scott? I am ready. Awesome. Bear with us for some confusion as we're switching, live event platforms. So I'm definitely still, I'm not a tech person.

So today, Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Lyn. I am a customer service rep here at warmly yours. I'm also joined by one of our tech guys.

Scott. Hello. Thanks for joining us.

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Scott. Today, we're talking about some installation tips for heating tile floors. So if you have any questions on this or want to, you know, kind of chat about an upcoming project, Feel free to type away in the chat. We would be more than happy to answer any questions. If we don't get to them right away, we'll definitely address them by the end of the presentation.

So we're going to be going over, kind of a general introduction to floor heating, especially, you know, our electric floor heating products. And then we're going talk about heating with both tempzone cable and tempzone flex roll. So we're gonna show you two different ways to get electric floor heating underneath tile floors.

So I want to start off talking about the, benefits of floor heating. And obviously, there are quite a few of them I think that there is a kind of con misconception that it's not especially energy efficient. And really that's not true. It tends to be, even more energy efficient than traditional forced air systems.

You only have to heat wear and when you need it, and you're also going to be, helping to reduce allergens and dust and air movement throughout the house. And it's also incredibly easy to install. If you're already replacing a floor, adding some floor heating is not going to be an extra, a much extra step, and it's going to give you all those benefits in the long run. So some of the systems that we offer are tempzown, that's going to be, either mattes or loose cables.

And that's going to be great for under, tile stone, most hardwoods, viral and things like that. We also have in Byron, which is a foil backed mat, and that's great for under carpet. If you're the States and floating floors, engineered wood, things like that. And then we also have in slab, concrete heating, in both mats and loose cables as well.

So today, we're gonna main mainly looking at our tempzone products.

So can you kind of tell us, Scott, what to consider when you're looking at heating a tile floor?

Yeah. Well, I I love this picture here because, one of the for people who haven't done this before, Just a word of advice. Don't try to figure it all out on your own. Simply just give us the dimensions of your room, and we will do an installation plan for you for free.

Won't cost you anything. You usually get it within twenty four hours. And, we do common things like getting under that toe kick. You wanna make sure that you get under the toe kick on that cabinet on the right side because you don't want your feet to be warm, but your toes to be cold.

So you get your your heat there under the, under the toe kick. And also, you don't want to, put the system too deep You wanna make sure that the heating wires are within an inch to an inch and a half of the top of the tile. That way, it gives you the maximum amount of warm because the heat only radiates about an inch and a half from the wire itself. So if you bury that wire three inches deep, you're not going to be getting much heat.

So, what you wanna do is you wanna get that, up in the upper layer in the thin set.

One to one and a half inches from the tile from the top of the tile.

If you look there at the back of the picture, if that is a closet, do not want heat in the closet, unless, your local code authority says you can because it's against the national electric code to put floor heating in closets. So if you want to heat your closet, make sure you ask your local code authority or authority having jurisdiction.

If that is allowed where you live. And, also, there, you know, we can see a shower on the left side. Do you wanna heat that heat that shower or not. If you do, just let us know.

Our product is wet location listed, so you can put it in the shower if you wish. So, make sure that you you plan on the thickness of the cable. You don't not the cable, but, the thickness of the tile because you don't want a really thick tile there that's gonna get the wire too far from the top of the of the tile surface. And The most important thing is, and the reason why I let off immediately with getting a free installation plan is you cannot cut the heating cable.

So if you have too much, if you guess incorrectly, then you may have extra cable and you can't cut it. So that's why we always ask do you have any cabinets because you can't go under cabinets. You can go under the toe kick, but you can't go under the cabinet itself. So those are the things you wanna look out for.

Send us a sketch of your floor.

Show us where your your products are, going to be sitting on top of the tile. You stay out from under that. If you wanna go in the shower or not, you can see that there is a shower bench there. Let us know if you wanna heat the shower bench because you can do that too. A lot of people do that because the bench, shower bench can get very, very cold. And that's why you want to plan on heating that if you can. So those are just a few of the things you wanna look out for when you're planning your installation.

Absolutely. Awesome. So looking at our TEMstone systems, like I said, we have TEMstone cable and rolls. So this is going to, be the I should rephrase that.

This is a great system for like we said underneath tile and stone things like that. And both of these are great options, either using the mat or the, cable, just kind of depends on, a few different factors, how much you want to pay or what your budget is for the, system or for the, you know, remodel, and also how much labor you want to be doing. Obviously, cables are usually a bit more economical, but can be a little bit more labor intensive and time consuming. So we're gonna be going over both of these options and kind of walk you through the steps for each, so you can make a really good informed decision for your project.

Both of these are, wet location listed. So they're ideal for bathrooms. Obviously, bathrooms and kitchens tend to places that you see tile floors the most, and these are rated to be put in those areas for sure. They're not going to be.

I think a lot of people get concerned about electric floor heating in a bathroom or shower, and that they're rated for that. That's what these are made for. It's perfectly safe. And the systems on a GFCI protective thermostat too.

Yes. So you're not going to get shocked.

So looking at tempzone cables first, This is going to give you a lot of flexibility in your design. So I've also seen this used, in rooms that are, you know, kind of circular or have weird juts and turns and things like that so that you get, a lot of flexibility and you can really heat around whichever areas or however you need to.

So, this is going to give you, a little bit more coverage than you could get with the flex rolls because obviously those are cut and turn, and they're not going to fit into as many spaces.

And then can you kind of tell us a little bit about these fixing strips and what they do? Yeah. The fixing strips have been around about as long as cable has been around. I think cable was like the one of the very first products that came out years and years and years ago.

And you can see there that you have the cable fixing strips and these these heating cables are not going under that tub. You don't heat under the tub. You stay away from that area because you have to worry about drains. Have to worry about hot water pipes, you have to water worry about cold water pipes, that sort of thing.

So you don't want to be going under the tub or around where those pipes are going to be drilled through the floor. You, if you put in a, a floor floor heating system and you drill through it, you're no longer going to have a floor heating system. So you want to take special care to look out for that. But if you have a round room, if if you have a room that's got a lot of mixed crannies.

It's going to be faster to install it with these cable fixing strips, and you can attach them, with double sided tape, or you can use screws, or you can use nails, or you can use, staples, that sort of thing to attach those to the floor, and then you string the cable back and forth between those cable fixing strips, and that's what gives you the correct spacing. Those little knobs that are on there are one inch on center. So for every knob you use, that's your spacing that you're going to be. And it looks like the I can't really see.

Yeah. These are at three inch spacing.

So, this floor was installed at three inch spacing. It's going down.

There in in in those two spaces. And if you have a run of, you know, this maybe three or four or five feet from strip to strip, then you're going to wanna take some, masking tape and just run it over those cables to hold them down and hold them in place while you thin set yourself level over the top of them.

Absolutely.

Can you use, cables with a little bit closer or further apart spacing? Yeah. Yeah. You can, that's what's so great about the the cables is you don't have to use three inch spacing.

If you are, over a cold area, like if this room right here, if this were over an overheated crawl space, then you'd want definitely wanna do three inch spacing. And if you are on the second floor above a kitchen and that second floor already starts at a temperature like seventy two or seventy four. You don't need as many watts per square foot to get that floor on the second story to heat up like you would on the first floor over a cold area. So that would be a prime, job upstairs that you could do a four inch spacing.

If you go beyond four inch spacing, you sometimes can have some mixed results So the best spacing is three. And if you're on a second story, just a general, this, you know, just a general I want my floor to be warm type thing. Then four inch spacing is probably okay upstairs unless it's a room that's got three exterior walls. If it's got cathedral ceilings, if it has a fireplace, if it has a bunch of skylights, those types of rooms are full of heat loss, which means those rooms are harder to heat.

So you'd have to go. I need to get the wires as close as possible, three inches in this room because I've got all these things that are going to figure into how warm the floor is. So that's something you wanna keep in mind that if you have a a floor that's in a room that's got really high ceilings. It's got a lot of, exterior walls.

And in those exterior walls, there are a bunch of giant windows, and we see bathrooms like that all the time. Those rooms are hard to heat because they have a lot of heat loss. Every wall, every window, every skylight, every item like that is an area where the heat can escape, so the heat that your floor is making, it escapes through those things, especially an exterior wall that has an exterior door in it. Because as soon as you open that door, all the heat goes out.

So those are the kind of things that you want to look out for. You say, hey, my my my, bathroom's on the second story. You told me to use four or five inch spacing not always the truth. You wanna make sure it doesn't have a bunch of heat lost before you do that.

So those are the kind of things. If you can give us your dimensions, and tell us what kind of room is it is. And if there are any things like that, we can get you the right product.

Perfect.

Alright. So tempzone flexibles are next, and these are ideal for quick easy installation. The cable is pre spaced at three inches already. So you are good to go for pretty much any kind of application, whether that be a first floor, second floor, eighteenth floor, whatever you're doing, that three inch spacing is gonna be great. And these do come in two different widths. There's one and and three foot widths. And this is also part of, you know, kind of getting it into those tighter spaces or having that flexibility in the layout and design of the actual heating system itself.

This is something that you want to make sure that you are installing.

Again, you want to make sure you're getting the size product that you need. And what we offer is, or our smart plans.

These are complimentary next day plans. I think we get into them a little bit more in a moment, but these are going to actually show you specifically for the cable, how to run it, or for the flex roll, exactly where you'll be cutting and turning it. And you can see on the mesh, there are definitely, areas you can kind of cut into without cutting the cable. Just making sure that you're protecting that cable.

You want to install it wire side down and that you're following the heating diagram so that you know exactly every step of that install for these flexer holes. Yeah. The thing to keep in mind is the three foot widths are available at two forty. So two forty volt, and they are for installing into very large rooms because it lets you install that twice as fast if it's twice as wide.

So, mostly those are two forty volt rooms, and they are done in large spaces. And usually they're large rectangular spaces. So those are, when the three foot widths are being used because if you happen to do a bunch of cuts and turns with the three foot wide, then you're going to start running into trouble because it's just so big and so wide. So, that's where you are going to be using that three foot width instead of the one foot five inch width.

And if you look there at the spacing on the mesh, we talked about its three inch spacing.

Earlier, we said the wires, the the heat travels an inch and a half from each wire. That's why the wires are three inches apart because The one wire will reach inch and a half, and the other wire will reach the other inch and a half, and then you have nice smooth heating all the way across. As those get further apart, you start to have cold, slightly cooler areas in between the wires. The further apart they get, the more cool gets in that area between them.

So that's why we normally don't go over four inches. And when you get to five inches or six inches, you're just gonna have cold stripes. Down between the heating wire. So that's that's why they are spaced at three inch spacing because the heat travels an inch and half from the wire.

Good to know. Alright. Cross sections. These are some of my favorite, ways to picture floor heating, because I think it gives you a really good idea of the steps and what you'll be looking at, during the installation process.

So starting out with the, tempzone flex, can you kind of show us or walk us through each step of this cross section? Yeah. What's common is the subfloor being wood. So on that wood, you have to have fixing strips to hold the cable in place, with the cable system, and the mesh holds the cable in place using the rolls.

So you can see if you have the wood subfloor, you have to put the fixing strips down first. Then you take the cable and you string it back and forth between the strips. And then you put thinset over it, and then you set the tile.

On the left, you have that subfloor the flex roll, the modified thinset, and the tile floor over the top. Always make sure you remember to install your floor sensor, and it goes into that open loop that you can see it doesn't run over the heating wire, and it would do the same thing on the right. It would run into the open loop area, never running that wire over the heating wire.

Wonderful. So now, Temestone cable, obviously, this is pretty simple and very similar. You're starting out with those fixing strips, and those can be attached directly to the wood subfloor. Correct?

Correct. Yep. Mhmm. By And then by nails or screws or staples, mhmm. Whatever works. Absolutely.

And then you'll run that tempzone cable back and forth. You'll cover it with that thinset again, and then the tile like you normally would.

A lot of times they do like the single step or the two step method. Mhmm. Nine times out of ten with most of our customers, they do the two step, which is where they put the product down on the subfloor. They adhere the subfloor. They hear the the cable or the, or the mesh to the subfloor. When you're attaching the flex roll to the subfloor, you're going to want to use hot glue. Hot glue is the best thing, or you can use staples if you go into the mesh, you'd never ever staple over a wire.

I don't care what you say. You you can't guarantee that you're gonna do it safely. You'd never ever staple over the heating wire, and you never ever staple over the non heating lead. Which is the lead that runs from the wall from the thermostat down the wall across the floor over to the heating wire. So never ever use staples on the wire, but you can use staples to hold the mesh down. Because remember, we suggest that the cables are installed cable side down.

If you put the staples over the top of that mesh, it will not let the cables up because you're holding the mesh down and the cable under the mesh. So, but the first safety's sake, the best thing to use is hot glue with the, flex roll and, you know, and the fixing strips with the cable, obviously.

Alrighty. And then, now for a concrete slab or concrete subfloor, there is another step that you'll want to do first. And can you kind of tell us why you would want to lay out some kind of insulation over the top of that slab. Yeah.

You want to, uncouple the heat from the slab because the slab, if it's touching the cables, we'll pull the heat down into the subfloor. And, oh, people say, well, in the old days, they used to heat the slab. Well, they did, but they used higher wattage. This is fifteen watts per square foot.

It's designed to go in thin set on top of you were directly under the flooring. Because you want it within an inch to an inch and a half of the top of the tile or whatever your surface is. So you don't want it down in the concrete and you don't want the concrete down unbek below it to to absorb all the heat. You want the heat to go upward.

And the best way to do that is to put a thermal barrier between the concrete and the heat, and that means you're using Cerazorb, which is a synthetic cork and it's, it's got a higher r value than regular cork does. It also is a, a synthetic product which means it won't harbor and cause mold to grow or help mold to grow.

There's nothing there for the mold to eat. It's all synthetic. So you want to get that on there, and that's why, you know, it's great in bathrooms too on concrete slash. Because we know the water spills.

You get water splashing and that sort of stuff. On those floors, you don't have to worry about that surge, cerazorb getting wet because no mold is going to grow there. So that's what the cerazorb is for. You would you would hear the Cerazorb to the concrete subfloor using modified thinset.

And that's the same for the cable or the mesh because all you're doing is you're attaching the Cerazorb to the subfloor using modified thinset and then you're installing the tempzone or the temp one cable or the flex roll on top of it and then covering that with modified thinset and then tile.

Perfect.

So all of our thermostats come with a complimentary floor sensor.

That does come in the thermostat box. That is something that, you might not think is something you need to know, but is a very important tip A lot of people call in, worry that they didn't get a sensor, and it is in the thermostat box. It's kind of hiding. So just make sure that you grab that.

First. You wanna make sure if especially if, you're not doing the install yourself, if an an electrician or a flooring contractor is, you want to make sure that you give them that floor sensor that they can install it at the same time and in the same, location as the heating.

This needs to be at least six to eight inches into an open loop. And that means obviously that it's not, you never want it touching or running across or running, you know, on top of any kind of the heating any part of the heating wire.

And this is kind of shown here, obviously, sleeve, you can see it's not all the way out in the center of the room. It's kind of just, again, six to eight inches into that heat area is all you need to get a adequate reading on that sensor to tell exactly what temperature the floor is putting out.

Can you tell us a little bit about floor sensors and backup sensors or why those might be wanted or needed? Yeah. Some people want to install a backup sensor just for the peace of mind. But the thing is you don't want to you install them both and you run them both up the wall, never ever in the same conduit as the leads. For the heat floor heat, they need to go either in the wall or their own conduit, and then you only attach one to the thermostat.

If you attach both of them to the thermostat, your thermostat will not work because the ohms readings coming up from it will be wrong. They'll be off. So your floor will think it's a hundred and fifty degrees when it's really only sixty five. So you cannot attach both of them, but you can stall both run and run both of them up the wall and it's in their own conduit and then leave one of them, one of the wires balled up in the back of the box. And one of them attached to the thermostat. And that way, you know, that one, you know, once it gets put in and it gets put in correctly, I don't think I've ever seen one go wrong.

Or or go bad. What happens is sometimes they get dinged when the person is using a a trowel or something. They'll cut through the wire. When they're trying to get it in the wall, they'll pull it too tight and catch it on a piece of conduit and get a a short or something like that.

So that's what you wanna look out for. So you're you're more than welcome to get a backup sensor. You're probably not going to need one, but if you do decide to get one, make sure that you get only one installed and one of them coiled up in inside the box. Also, one thing about where you wanna put the sensors, you wanna put the sensor somewhere on the floor that it's not going to get hut hit by the sun.

You don't want to put the sensor in an area where the sun hits because then when the sun's out and it's hitting the floor, The sensor is going to say, oh, this floor is a hundred and ten degrees. I don't need to turn on, but the rest of the floor where the sun isn't hitting is fifty degrees. The only problem is the sensor is going, hey, it's nice and warm here. Yeah, but the rest of the room isn't warm.

So that's what you wanna watch out for. You wanna place it somewhere where the where the afternoon sun or the morning sun or whatever it is doesn't hit that sensor because it will cause your system not to work correctly.

Absolutely. And if you're, like, my house, you'll always know where the sun is on the floor because the dog is right in that spot every single time. Exactly. And I'm I'm glad you brought that up because you wouldn't wanna put it under an area that has a dog bed or a cat bed on top of it either.

Because those areas get ten or fifteen degrees warmer than the remainder of the floor. So you could have an eighty five degree area under the dog bed or the floor hamper or whatever happens to be there, and or the mattress or anything like that. And that that spot will be warm in the rest of room will be cold. So that's something you wanna do too.

Don't put that sensor where something's going to be sitting on the floor all the time.

Definitely.

So looking at, the actual beginning of the installation process, can you kind of tell us how you test your system to ensure that it's working because I've been seeing actually more and more people attempting to wire the system up and turn it on and heat it before it's embedded. And I wanna go over a good way to test it without having to potentially damage it by heating it up first. You'd never turn the system on before it's covered with thinset and tile. And you never turn it on until that tile, thin set has cured, which could be seven days.

It could be fourteen days. Last thing you wanna do is roll it out and then and then test it and then it doesn't get hot enough and you call and say, hey, my floor isn't working. Well, your floor is working, It's just not there's there's no tile there to hold the heat in the floor. It just goes all straight up into the air.

So the the heat doesn't even reach the sensor. It just goes straight up. So, yeah, when somebody calls, it says, yeah, I turned my floor on.

One of the first things we ask is, is the floor covering over it yet? If they say no, then we immediately say we'll stop. You're not going to be doing any testing anyway. What you need to do is you need to test your system with a digital ohmmeter.

And the digital ohmmeter is the item that you're going to use before you install it in the middle of your installation to make sure everything is good. And then at the end, so you can write that number down in the installation manual. That'll be your proof of a good installation. And whenever you're not using the meter, you're using the circuit check. Because you test it with a meter, you put the circuit check on, turn it on, then do your installation.

Then when you're done laying it out, Take this take the circuit check off, test it again the second time. If everything tests good, you can now put flooring over it You don't want to install flooring over the top of a system and it doesn't work. And the only way you're going to know if it's working or not is to do the ohms test. So if that passes that test, you can then put the circuit check back on again and then start to put the thinset in the tile over the top of it.

If you happen to cut the wire, the circuit check, what it does is it's making sure that you have a heating circuit and it's making sure that there is not an open circuit, and it's also going to make sure that there is not a short circuit, and a short circuit is from the heating wire to the ground. There's two wires inside that heat up, and there's a ground inside. So there's three wires. You wanna make sure the two heating wires never touch the ground.

And you wanna make sure that the two heating wires always have a connection, and that's what the circuit check does. So if that circuit check says, hey, you know, everything's good, At the end, you do your test and it says, yep, your own readings are good. You write those numbers down in the installation manual, and that is your record of a successful installation.

If you have to get a meter, you have to. So there's really no question about that to to follow the instructions, you have to have a digital home meter. One you wanna look for is the one that has the knob on the front that has a bunch of things on the front that to to turn to. You wanna you wanna a digital ohmmeter that has an ohm section that's got four or five different values because you wanna turn it to two hundred or you wanna turn it to twenty k and you don't want to buy a self ranging meter.

The more expensive the meter, the more problems you're going to have. So we suggest getting an inexpensive meter that works and has a knob on the front. You can set to the two hundred range of ohms and one you can set to the two twenty thousand range. The twenty thousand range is for testing your your, thermostat sensor, and the two hundred is for testing most of the flooring product.

So you're going to need both of these if you're going to install.

And these are not expensive items, are they? I mean, if you're looking for a digital ohmmeter, you don't need to get the fanciest one actually tends to be I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Scott, they tend to be actually the cheaper ones are the ones that you're gonna be looking for for this kind of product and installation. Yep. As long as they work, that's the main thing.

But We run into, people all the time. I've got this really expensive brand x meter, and it cost me five hundred dollars. The only problem is that that meter is self ranging. And some sometimes it'll catch the two hundred range, but then when they go to test the sensor, which is between eight thousand and eighteen thousand ohms, the self ranging part doesn't find it, and it says, your your sensor's bad.

It's no. The sensor's not bad. Your meter that cost you a fortune isn't going to the twenty k range. Well, these inexpensive meters, this one was twenty bucks.

Lets you tune it to the twenty k range, and then it will give you the numbers so you can confirm that instead of hitting range, range, range, range, range, trying to find it the reading, get an inexpensive one. The more we we historically find that the people that have the most problems doing their their range, doing their measurements are the ones that have the expensive meters and the ones that have the analog meters. And analog meters need to go away because these meters now are so inexpensive. You don't want the meter on the front with a needle going.

It's impossible to get a floor or own reading using a meter with an analog needle on it. So please don't even try to use those.

Good tips.

So we're gonna be going over a project that was done using tempzone, fixing strips and loose cable. So, obviously, this is the heating system is the cable, and the dimensions of the entire room that was being heated is about one hundred and twenty three square feet And the heated area itself was about ninety four square feet. Can you kinda tell us why what the discrepancy is?

Yeah. You never heat the entire space. The floor no one ever stands against the wall. So there's no need to heat right up against the wall.

That will save you the cost of the product, and that will save you the cost of the electricity. So usually, you only heat about eighty, eighty five percent of the room. And and that's why this number is askew. That's why the total area is one twenty three, but the heated area is only ninety four.

Because you just don't need to heat right up to the wall. And that'll save you on electricity, you know, electricity every month.

While still heating the room. That that much less is not going to be the cause of the room feeling, you know, extra cold or something like that. Put the heat where your feet touch it. So if you're, like, in the blair witch house and you're standing against the wall, I guess, maybe. Exactly.

Right. Halloween. I'm thinking all those horror movies now. Or if you're going to a school dance and all you ever do is stand right up against the wall, that's about the only time the wall flowers would get cold feet.

And they already have cold feet. They already have cold feet. That's why they're wallflowers. Oh my gosh.

That was actually really good.

Alright. Anyway, so the power requirements for this size area, again, about ninety four square feet of heating, you're looking at, just about fourteen hundred watts, eleven point six three amps. So this is all going to be on one fifteen amp non GFI breaker. Keep in mind that the thermostat is a GFCI thermostat, so you wanna make sure that it's not going on a GFI circuit. And every floor heating project is not to forty. That's another common misconception by a lot of electricians.

Homeowner will say I've got floor heat, and they'll instantly put in a two forty volt circuit. A small room that's under a hundred and twenty square feet doesn't need a two hundred and forty volt system. Two hundred and forty volts is not more efficient than one twenty. It's the same. So you're going to get the same heat out of one twenty system as you do a two forty system. And for smaller rooms, that way you are only using one breaker space instead of two. So that's what you wanna keep in mind.

Yes. And these are not, as far actually, expensive to operate. I kind of touched on that earlier, but you can definitely see it here per hour. This whole room based on you know, averages of electricity rates, you're looking at about five cents an hour to heat the space, or if you're running it for eight hour a day, maybe it's a home office or a kitchen, something like that. You'd be looking at about forty cents for the entire day of nice warm, nice warm room, nice warm, flooring, nice warm toes. And the thing is if you're in that room only four hours a day, you're using half of that amount of electricity. So it's it's it could be very inexpensive.

It definitely can. And you only have to really be heating when you're in the area. It's not the kind of thing you need to be pumping hot air in kind of constantly. Well, that's what you're talking about at the very beginning about how how it actually more energy efficient, what you can do is not every in a lot of homes, not everybody is in every room of the house.

All the time. A lot of people have a basement that never gets used except during the holidays, or there's two extra bedrooms that never get used except during the holidays. Well, if you're if you're turning your central, heat up to seventy degrees, you're heating the basement, you're heating those two spare rooms, and that rest of the house where what you can do is you can turn your central heating down to sixty five, and then just use the heat in the area where sit. So every time you come home right after work, you sit in the living room, there's no need to heat the rest of the house up to seventy degrees.

You turn the air the the central heat down to sixty five, and then you turn the floor heat on in the room that you're in. Then you know every night at nine o'clock, You have a heated bedroom and a heated living room. The heated living room heat can go down, and the bedroom heat can go up. And then that way, you're doing this.

And you're using the same amount of power, but the entire house isn't keeping really hot. It's just the spaces that you're in.

Yes. It's definitely a great system to use.

So this is actually the smart plan that I had kind of touched on earlier in is what a smart plan with, cable and fixing strips is gonna look like.

As you can see, there is a I think you can you can see my mouse. Correct?

Okay. So this is the start of the cable. This is going to be where it ends. So you'll want to make sure that you're starting the run where it's marked and that the thermostat and floor sensor are being put in that same area again per the drawing.

The one of the most important parts, and one of the coolest things about these cables, I think, is the halfway mark. Can you kinda tell us what that is and what the point is? Yeah. The the red dot on plan matches up with a white dot on the red cable.

So you know that if you're doing your installation and all of a sudden, the white spot on your cables coming up, ten feet to the left of that red dot on the plan. You know that the heating wires were installed too close together. If that white dot appears on the second half of the room, you know that you've used too little cable, and you probably did four inch spacing instead of three inch spacing. And now you're going to have too much cable at the end.

Those are the people that call us and go, I've got too much cable. Can I cut it off? And the reason why they say that is because they installed it at a at a different spacing than what they were quoted.

So you want to watch out for that. What's so good about this product is remember, you don't have to heat right up against the wall. So if you don't have enough heating cable, you can pull it away from the walls a little bit. You wouldn't wanna be a foot and a half from the wall.

But if you look at some of these spaces, there are only three inches from the wall, or in one spot at six inches from the wall. Remember, the heat travels an inch and a half from the cable. So that three inch space there in the toilet that's really only about an inch and a half sliver of unheated space at the side of the wall there. You can bring the coverage in and eliminate a couple of those runs because you don't have somebody standing against the wall, in the toilet room.

So that's where you're going to be able to pull it away. Use less in one spot to move it to another spot. Remember, you always want the heat where your feet are, and then you can stay away from areas where your feet aren't going to be. You always wanna stay away from areas in front of doors.

You never wanna run it right up to the door because what happens is if there's a transition from a carpet, to the tile in the room, there's going to be a transition strip there. And later after you install this, they're going to install the transition us, on top of that, and they're gonna put a nail through the wire that's right there in the doorway. So you keep it out of the door, and keep it away from the walls. And then that way, you can go, hey, you know what?

I've got too much cable. You can go you can pull, you can, fill excess areas. Like, if they have too much cable, look for areas where there is no cable installed, like the area to the left and the right of that toilet, You can install cable there as long as it's three inches away from each other. And as long as it's four inches away from the wax ring, you shouldn't have any problems.

So you've got a couple feet there on each side of the toilet. You can use excess in. Also, you have a six inch gap there inside the toilet room from where the cable is on the left wall. You can see there's a six inch gap there with a six, a green six with a six inch mark there.

That means you could probably get two runs of cable right there. To fill that space. And so and so on and so forth, you can get rid of extra cable by putting it in areas that aren't shown or if you don't have enough cable, you can pull it away from the walls to get it into the area where it's really needed.

Definitely.

Because we don't really care about stepping on a cold spot from one room to the other. Sure. You just don't wanna step on a cold spot inside the room that you're in? Definitely.

Yeah. That would be unpleasant for sure. So, these fixings strips are attached to the subfloor, any number of ways that works. I've found that different people have different luck with different types of, attaching it.

So, people will use screws, concrete nails, double sided tape.

Is there Obviously, you've done a lot of these installation, Scott. Have you Scott's Scott, have you found, that there's any really good way to do this, or, you know, what would you recommend? It depends on the subfloor that you have. So if you've got a wood subfloor, if you have it, I know a lot of people use staples.

They can staple right through the side there. But if you can also use if if you have a nice wood stem floor and you got some nice short screws, you can screw there's a hole right in the center of each one of those holes or each one of those knobs. You just put a quick a screw in real quickly, like every four inches or so. You don't need to put one every single one.

You put it every four or five inches, and that'll hold it all in place. Could you go back one slide because we have to talk about, those strips and where they're put in there. So you see where the great big tub is. It looks like a TV.

There, right in the center at that bottom of that tee TV looking thing, there's a four. That four inch marking shows you how far strips are installed from that wall. So if you get this facing correct, your plans will be correct. And your results will be good. If it tells you to put it four inches from that space, and all of a sudden, you you know what? I'm gonna put that six inches from that space. You're going to have too much cable at the end.

If you put that one inch from the the the tub, you're going to run out of cable at the end. You have to install it the correct amount of distance from the wall. So look at that bottom left corner there.

You walk in the door to the bottom left. You see four and a half inches there, to the left. That has to be four and a half inches from the wall to the cable fixing strip. If you make that six inches, you're going to have too much cable at the end. If you make that one inch, you're not going to have enough cable at the end. So that's why these distances are all shown on your plan to make sure that the cable rests on the floor like it's shown.

Awesome. Scott, can you adjust your mic a little bit? It's getting muffled.

Buckled? Okay. I can do that. That's better. There we go. I don't know what that was.

So this is, again, they're, spaced an inch apart on center. So for three inch spacing, you'll just wrap those cables every three notches, and it's pretty simple, pretty easy, and it gives you, again, a lot of that flexibility as needed.

Next is going to be installing the cable. So once these fixing strips are down, you'll run-in the cable according to that smart plan. Are there any, tips or tricks that you'd like to throw out here, Scott? No. You can just see that these that the nails or screws, whatever they were done here, This is actually done to the plan that was shown that we just showed showed you.

So you can see that strip is four and a half inches from the wall. They've put a screw every four inches on the cable fixing strips. And just keep in mind, Look for that dot. Once you get into the plan and all of a sudden, you see the white dot should be there.

You need to, you know, it's you're going to be off a foot or two. It's okay to be, oh, I landed one foot before the red dot shows on the plan. That's alright. That's not a big deal.

But if your red dot's here, and your cable is four or five runs before that or four or five runs after it, it's going to be, hey, You know what? Your spacing is going to be wrong. You're either going to not have enough or you're going to have too much.

So once the cable has been run, you want to make sure that you are securing it to the subfloor.

This is a especially important if you're going to be using self leveling concrete.

But it's also important if you're still using, if you're using thin set because, obviously, you want to make sure that these stay in place, and it's pretty simple to secure them. All you need to do is tape them down every few feet. You can use masking tape. It looks like here duct tape was used.

So you just wanna make sure that they're held in place just for the time being while you embed them in whatever you're going to be embedding them in. Yeah. You don't have to you don't have to use three inch tape. You can really use three quarter inch.

It just just enough to hold it in place because if you pour self leveling over it, it's going to flow to the top. Yes. So you need to really, really pay attention to that because you could run into trouble, and we talk to people all the time that do that. Yes.

It's definitely easy to do and is going to save you a headache in the long run.

And then from there, you'll basically tile over the floor as you normally would, and we'll go into tiling over tempzone in just a little bit. But this shows, the will cost breakdown of that, smart plan that we showed earlier. So this was a three hundred seventy five, linear foot cable And at three inch spacing, that covers, just over ninety three square feet. And the MSRP for this is about six eighty nine dollars And as you can see, the fixing strips, are using cable with fixing strips, is going to save on average about thirty seven percent on overall cost. So if budget is really tight or pricing is important, then you want to make sure that you're considering tempzone cable.

Keep in mind also these fixing strips, when you purchase tempzone cable from us are going to come free. Otherwise, they're a dollar each.

So they will come basically free with that cable and will provide you with plenty to cover that space.

So moving on to tempzone flex rolls, these are some of our most popular products that we see used the most.

And this is going to the project we're gonna go over shows a hundred and twenty volt TEMstone Flexerol. Again, a hundred twenty three square feet of space in a actually heated about ninety square feet. The total wattage is one thousand three hundred forty six watts, eleven amps, and it's still using just that one fifteen amp one twenty volt non GFI breaker.

And is this is going to be the same, room and it's going to kind of show the same, operating cost as well. So you can see even with using Temestone Flexerals or cable, you're still gonna walk away with similar power requirements and similar operating cost. Because it's still going to be that three inch spacing.

So this is the smart plan for that same earlier room, but with attempts on flex roll. So can you kind of tell us what we're looking at here? I think for some people, this can be a little daunting at first. Yeah. It's just a cut and turn, and, the wires are three inch spacing, and there's a loop at this side that goes from here to here. Then on the other side, there's a loop that goes from here to here means when you're here, you can only turn right.

When the loop is on this side, you can only turn that direction. When the loop is on this side, you can only turn that direction. So you wanna watch out for that. That's why you that's why it says three feet exactly to turn left.

You can't go three feet three inches and turn left. Because of three inch, a three feet, three inches, you can only turn right. So there is no left turn at three feet, three inches. We see a lot of people that are on their first floor, and they say, I need this run to be, three feet, three inches instead of three feet.

And I need it to turn left. It it can't happen. It's physically impossible. So that's why our plan is going to show you that These are these are the people that call up the first time and they wanna figure it all out themselves, and they're more than welcome to, but why not have the engineer do it?

Because they do it a hundred times a day every day of the year. So you have to keep in mind you can only turn right when the loop is on that side and you can only turn left when the loop is on that side. And if you look there in that toilet room, Lyn, you can see the, free form areas. The free form areas are where you actually have to take the wire off of the mesh, and that's where it gets a little more time consuming with this product is it's great for big flat areas, but when you have to start going through doorways, you're going to have to take the wire off of the mesh, which means it's pretty easy.

You just There's only tape holding it. You pull the tape up and you pull the cable off, but then you have to use hot glue to hold it down as it makes its cuts and turn as it makes its turn, because you still have to wire have the wire three inch facing, but you don't have any strips to use. So you have to physically hot glue it down in those areas where you go through the doorway there. So you can see there's a three in a square on the right side.

That three inches in a square means you're taking three inches of mesh. You're cutting the mesh, and you're taking the wire off of it, and that's going into that area. So that loose wire is a foot and a half, because remember, each length of wire is a foot and a half, and it's on a three inch strip. So if you take three inches of mesh away, you're left with one run of cable and the run of cable from left side to right side is a foot and a half.

So they're using a foot and a half of cable there, then on the right side, they're using a foot and a half of cable there. So if you look down in the lower right corner, you'll see a six in a square, to the right there that six in the square is telling you that that six is actually six inches of mesh. Not six inches of wire, six inches of mesh, because six inches of mesh gives you two runs of wire. And that's a foot and a half and a foot and a half.

So now you have three feet of loose cable that you use to fill that space there where the six in a square is. Those are the big those are the big two differences between those two products. You have the triangle at the start with the t, with the thermostat is, and you have the rectangle or square in the bottom right where the end of the product is going. And then all those numbers on the green mesh is the number of feet and inches that you run the mesh out to make your cuts and turns.

Exactly. And you can also see the coverage is very similar. You're getting, pretty close to the walls again, usually somewhere within about, three to four inches away from the wall. So it's just another way to get similar coverage, just a different, just a different way to do the actual installation.

So talking about measuring cutting, turning, this is going to be what you'd said, Scott, like, if you have a three foot, you know, three foot listing here, you'll wanna make sure that you're cutting at three feet, not three foot three inches.

So cut the mesh between the loops to turn the mat. Want to make sure that you are never ever. We've said this before. We'll say it a hundred times more. Never cutting the heating cable. When you're cutting anything on this, you want to make sure that it is the green mesh.

And then, obviously, you can cut that to unravel, unroll it in the other direction. You can cut it, cut the mesh away to free form the cable. Whatever needs to be done on that smart plan. It'll show you, and then you can follow those steps. And if you notice here, the cable is facing downward.

Cable side down. That's another question that we get all of the time. And also as you're doing your cuts and turns, don't adhere them to the subfloor until all your cuts and turns are done. Because if you have to do some moving around and you need to add some to the end, Well, you don't wanna have to pick all the product up that you've attached to the subfloor and to to reposition it. So you do all your cuts and turns, Make sure that all your cuts and turns worked, and it fills the space.

Then you can start adhering it down to the subfloor as you go.

Definitely. Can you kinda tell us, for tempzone flex rolls, how you'd want to adhere to the subfloor? Hot glue.

Perfect. So, yep, you just put hot glue. And what you can do is you can, put a dollop of hot glue on the mesh, and it's going to go down into the floor, and you can take a, a chisel, and you can use that chisel to spread the glue, and push it down through the mesh onto the subfloor and that way you don't burn your fingers trying to push it down yourself, but you can use that chisel, clean the chisel off and move on to the next one. Put the glue down, take the chisel spread it. You never hit the chisel.

To the cable, they never ever touch. You're just putting that glue down and smashing it and pushing it down in through the, the mesh into the subfloor, and that holds it all where you need it to go.

Definitely.

One of the, things I see will try a lot is using the white tape that's shown on the maps, to adhere to the subfloor. That's not going to normally be tacky enough to hold it in place. Make sure that you're doing something, again, like that hot glue or a staple gun. Right.

So can you kind of tell us about the one versus two step installation methods. One step is for people that have done hundreds of floors that have done hundreds of heated floors because what happens is you take the thin set, you you you the mesh is already attached to the subfloor. Now you take thin set and you put enough thin set on that to put the tile in. Well, you you should have about three eights of an inch of thin set to give you your nice heat bed that your tile sits on.

So it's hard to do that all in one step and not have a bunch of lippage, which is one tile higher than the other. It's very, very difficult to get perfect height on those tiles in the one step method. So ninety nine times out of a hundred, you do the two step, which means you put the product down You cover it with a quarter of an inch of thinset, then you come back the next day after it's dried, and then you can put some more thinset on it, back butter the tile, and set it and use spacers or whatever you need to use, but that's going to let you get an a much flatter floor than you would trying to get the right thickness all in one fell swoop.

Alrighty.

So the cost breakdown for the time zone flex roll, application for this project is, eight hundred fifty five dollars. You're looking at, they used a one and a half foot by sixty linear foot roll, and that's giving you again that ninety wear foot coverage.

So, Scott, can you kind of tell us about what you should keep in mind when actually installing the tile? Well, in this picture, it's great because you wanna make sure that those, those levellers, if you're using a leveling system that if they don't aren't gonna be pinching the wire. You're gonna make sure that you don't get it under the wire and then pinch the wire up into the tile. So you wanna watch out for that as you go.

That's the one thing you'll see. Also, when you're laying tile, clean the grout lines as you go because you don't want somebody to come back next week and take a really sharp blade and clean the grout lines out. Because a lot of times that person cleaning out the grout lines was not the person to put the floor in. So they are there to clean the lines and they don't know that there's electric heating able underneath it.

So that's where they get a really sharp blading. They start going into those grout lines trying to get that excess thinset out and they're going right down into the cable and cutting it. So what you wanna do is you wanna clean those grout lines as you go by using a rag or by using a sponge or a toothbrush works really good to clean that area out. That way, you don't have to come back later with a sharp knife and cut that out because I visited many, many floors to repair them after somebody did that.

And sometimes there are so many cuts through the wire because the person didn't know there was wire underneath There were so many cuts to the floor that they had to start over again, but that's a rarity. You know, usually you can make one or two repairs and those kind of things and not have much trouble. But that's one thing. Those people that come in to do those grout cleanings often don't know there's wire underneath it.

Definitely. And And yeah. People always ask about, well, how long do I have to wait to turn the system on? And that's until the thin set cures.

Because if you don't let the thin set cure, it will, it'll, it'll dry too quickly and it'll be brittle. And the more heat you give it, the more it's going to dry, and the faster it will dry. So you don't turn on the electric floor heating until the cure time has been observed. And that cure time is stated on the side of the thin set bag.

It'll say this thin set cures in twenty eight days or this thin set cures in fourteen days. It's not dries in fourteen days. It's cures in fourteen days. So never ever turn the heating system on before that cure time is complete.

Good to know. Alrighty. Any questions? I'm not seeing any right now, in the chat. So if any questions do up. We're going to do a little bit of housekeeping here right at the end, feel free to type away, and we'd be happy to answer them.

So our next webinar is going to be Thursday, November ninth, again, one o'clock central, here on Zoom events. And it's going to be about, some pro tips for heating with a luxury vinyl tile. So be sure to join us for that webinar.

We do offer daily trainings, again, right here on Zoom, usually twice a day, and often their host by me, hosted by Scott or somebody like that, one of our customer service reps. So we are, more than happy. We'd love to have you jump in They're usually about five to ten minutes. Learn a little bit more about our products or applications and, ask any questions that you might have.

For October, our promotion, is fifteen percent off of our snow melting system. So be sure to visit our website for more information on that After this is done, we will be sending out an email asking about your experience during today's webinar. So if you have any comments or suggestions we would love to hear them. We wanna make sure that we're talking about what you wanna hear about, so let us know what you're interested in.

And we are here if you have questions. We are available via phone, email, our website. However, best for you to contact us, works for us.

We would love to, get a smart plan out to you, help out with, beginning to plan your project or answer any questions that you might have.

And that's all we have today, so you, Scott, so much for joining us and sharing your expertise. Until next time, as always, stay warm. And be radiant. Thanks.