DIY Hydronic Radiant Floor Heat

I was never happy with the floors in our home. In the winter, which is about seven months where I live, my feet were always cold. We have a crawl space under the house and insulated skirting. I decided to start checking into heating solutions for our home.

I looked into solar water heating, but our northern climate doesn't get much sun in the winter. I researched electric floor radiant heating and decided it wasn't cost effective for me. Overall, it was looking like DIY hydronic radiant floor heating with an outdoor wood boiler would be the way I wanted to go.

My first challenge was finding my funds for the radiant heat supplies. I made up a plan of my do it yourself instalation and ran my parts list past a local hardware and home improvement center. The cost was a bit more than I had hoped but I decided to go ahead with my plan.

With an existing wood floor, there are two ways to proceed with hydronic heating. You can remove the flooring, lay down the PEX tubing and recover it with laminate or hardwood. This will raise the floor by as much as two inches, and I didn't want to raise the floor since this would involve refinishing the whole inside of my house.

The second method would be to install the tubing underneath the floor, using brackets and hangers. While this would require me to crawl under my house on my back and drill holes in the floor joists, I figured that would be easier than redoing all of my flooring.

The pump, holding tank and thermostatic controls I placed in the utility and laundry room. I brought the line from the boiler through the floor here. The boiler hot water line and return line had to have extra insulation on them and we buried them eight feet deep to avoild freezing them if the frost went into the ground too far.

It was a lot of work installing a DIY radiant heat system. It paid off though. Now when I walk through my house I don't need slippers to keep my tootsie from freezing off. The wife and children like it as well. The added bonus is our heating costs have dropped, since I use a wood fired boiler instead of a propane heating system.