Floor Heating!

 So the next step in the process is putting the heating in the floor! We are doing a radiant floor heat with a fireplace for supplemental heat in winter. The house faces to the south west and so catches as much heat from the sun that it can. Which will help a ton during the winter. The first step was to rent the machine you see Curt using above and packing down all of the rocks to get an even floor. Curt had the laser level out and was raking and packing. A lot of this boring stuff happens when I'm at home. I like the glamor jobs myself.

Then we had the rocks covered with a heavy sheet of plastic to keep out all of the damp, and then a 1 1/2" thick piece of insulation. That is what the blue stuff is.

 Next you lay down a metal grid and zip tie them together. I did this part, it's a bit like sewing, matching seams and stitching together to make it all even. Each square is 6" this way you can easily measure what you need the tubes to be at.

(A side note about zip ties, why do you think that the colorful zip ties are cheaper than the black zip ties. They are both the same length and strength, Do you think it's because most men are going to go for the black ones with out even looking at the price because, they are more manly looking and they don't want to look like a sissy? Well I went for the black ones at first, thinking there must be some reason for it. But as it turns out, there's not, so I went ahead and got the colorful ones on the next trip. I've not mentioned that it's actually been in the 80's the last week here in Bellingham, so what I did notice is that the colorful ones are not as hot to work with, from now on I'm sticking with the colored ones. )

This is how the grid looks all done.

A friend of ours that owns a heating company loaned us this great spool to put the tubing on. This makes life much easier and you don't have all the kinking up of tubes that you could. We were very grateful for this!

This is what it looks like when we got it all tied down. We have a graph that shows us where to put the tubes, some times its a foot wide and sometimes bigger, like in the bedroom where you don't really want it that warm at night. Closer in the bathroom where you really want it warm in the morning. 

These four tubes are two lengths of hose going from and returning to the boiler.

This is the bedroom, bathroom, laundry part of the house. They pour the floor tomorrow and then next weekend we will do the living, dining, kitchen part of the house.

I did mention that is has been super hot here for us Washingtonians. Between the 83 degree heat and the reflection off the insulation, we were roasting. Curt made his own little hat out of micro fiber towels. It kinda looks like a turban.............