Warm floor under the tiles in the bathroom with your own hands in the house: Instruction + Video

You decided to repair the bathroom and you were faced with a long-standing question, warm floor in the bathroom under is a tile a necessity or a luxury? The answer is not so obvious. To begin with, underfloor heating in the bathroom is not a heating system for your room, but rather an additional comfort in your bathroom.

Choosing a warm floor for a bathroom

Of course, leaving the hot bath relaxed and steamed onto the ice tiles is an unpleasant situation, but it can be solve in other ways.

We can definitely recommend equipping your bathroom floor with a heated floor if either small children or, on the contrary, elderly people live in your house, since this fact can directly affect their health.

So, the decision has been made - to have a warm floor in your bathroom.

The next question arises - which design to choose?

Two technologies are fundamentally different - water or electric heating.

Water heat-insulated floors

If you are the owner of an apartment or private house with an individual heating system, then you can consider this technology as acceptable.

Let's consider the main stages of installation of water-heated floors:

1. It is required to determine the location of the supply manifold by mounting and connecting it to the heating system of your home.

   This is important, since the entire pipe system will have to be oriented towards connection to the collector installation site.

2. Prepare the floor for pipe-laying, for this it is necessary to ensure that the floor is as flat as possible, it may be necessary to make a thin leveling screed. Then the waterproofing film should be laid with a slight overlap on the walls. A damper tape must be fixed along the perimeter of the wall, which is designed to compensate for the thermal expansion of the screed.
3. A heat-insulating sheet made of foamed polyethylene with a foil outer coating is laid on top of the waterproofing.

   Then a reinforcing mesh is mounted, designed to fix the water pipes and further strengthen the concrete screed.

4. Water floor heating pipes are installed on the reinforcing mesh. The most common pipeline installation schemes are "snake" and "spiral". In order to save money, one should refrain from laying the pipeline in places where it is planned to install plumbing and furniture. The distance between the pipes can vary from 10 to 15 cm.

   The pipes should not go closer than 8 cm from the walls.

5. After finishing the installation of pipes and connecting the system to the collector, it is necessary to carry out a test run of the warm floor to make sure it is working. The system must operate without leaks or failures for at least 5 hours. After that, the system turns off.
6. In the next step, a concrete screed must be laid on top of the water floor heating system.

   It should harden naturally, without additional heating. After the screed has completely hardened, you can start laying ceramic tiles. When buying tile adhesive, you need to make sure that it is designed for laying tiles on a warm floor.

It should be noted that after installing all the elements of the water-heated floor, raise the floor height by at least 40mm. It should also be borne in mind that the control system and the collector itself will take a significant place.

If you plan to have several independent heating circuits, then the control and distribution equipment for the additional circuit will also require additional installation space.

Electric underfloor heating

Installation of an electric underfloor heating is in many ways identical to installation water floor.

But the electrical components of such a system are much more compact - the control system is represented by a small box of a thermostat and a temperature sensor connected to it, and the pipelines have been replaced by roll mats, into which a thermal conduit is already installed.

Preparation for laying and installation of the heating system is also similar to the installation of water heating:

As mentioned above, the installation of an electric floor heating is much easier than a water one.

This is also due to the fact that many manufacturers sell their products in a set, so that the buyer does not need to spend time and effort to select and fit different parts of the system. The negative factors include the relative high cost of such a floor.

Infrared floor heating

The next stage in the development of floor heating systems can be considered a floor with infrared heating elements. The technology of this floor is based on the same principle as that of an electric floor heating.

This film is made in the form of a carbon membrane, under which there are copper wires. Such mats can be cut into smaller fragments, since the technology allows further joining the fragments into an integral canvas.

Installation of an infrared heated floor is similar to the installation of an electric heated floor. The cost of such a floor is even higher than that of an electric floor, but the ease of installation and ease of further operation make this technology more and more popular with consumers.

With certain skills, you can do it yourself with any of the described warm floors in your bathroom.