Heated Concrete Floor

I had always heard that living in a space heated from the floor up is the best kind of heat and makes for a very comfortable living space. I now know that to be true from my own experience. In the 1020 Nelson st project which is the house I now live in, we decided to heat the main floor of the home with a hot water heating system embedded in the concrete floor.

This system is quite simple and with some creativity it can cost less than what most people spend. Most systems cost $10,000-$15,000 and we built this one for less than $7,000. It consists of pex water lines running in a grid about every 12 inches and connected to a water heater or boiler and run through the floor with a water pump. The system is connected to a thermostat on the wall in the center of the house and calls for heat when it needs to just like most other forms of heat.

This type of heat isn’t the kind that you would want to connect a smart thermostat or Nest. A smart thermostat saves you money by lowering your room temperature while you are at work or asleep. Heated concrete takes too long to cool or warm for this to make sense. Having lived through the hot summer we also noticed that having the main floor of our house made of concrete the constant even temperature of this mass of concrete really helped keep our house cool through even the hottest summer days without any kind of mechanical air conditioner.

Please feel free to contact me for more details if you are interested in living in a space with heated floors.