When you're looking at luxury condos in downtown Toronto, you might be concerned about how many seem to feature hardwood, concrete, or ceramic tile flooring. These floors are nice to look at and relatively easy to keep clean, but they're also very cold. Walking on them in your bare feet early in the morning can be an ordeal unless you cover most of it up with area rugs. That's why in-floor heating has become such a popular option as of late. Read on to learn more about this novel form of heating.
With in-floor heating, you don't have the typical radiators or blower gates in your Oakville condos. Instead, the heating pipes run underneath the floor, which heats your floorboards and allows the heat energy to radiate up into the rest of the room. For this reason, in-floor heating is also commonly called radiant heat. In-floor heating can be used in one room only (usually the master bathroom) or throughout the entire house depending on the system.
In-floor heating has only recently become an in-demand feature for people who are looking at condos at 500 Queens Quay W, so it may seem to you like a new invention, but in fact people have been using in-floor heating for centuries. The early Romans, for example, use a hypocaust system to heat their villas and public baths, which involved building a raised floor over a furnace that would radiate heat up through the floor and into the rooms that needed heating.
In-floor heating can come from one of two types of systems: electrical resistance or piped liquid, also known as hydronic. They can also be incorporated directly into the floor (like in those Toronto condos that have poured concrete floors) or run underneath the floor. Therefore, installing radiant heat into a home that was not built with it is a major renovation that cannot be undertaken by amateurs. Your best bet is to buy a condo that has it already.
The power source for your in floor heating can be any number of things, including natural gas, coal, oil, electricity, or biomass. If you're building a home instead of buying one through Remax Mississauga, you might consider a more environmentally friendly option, such as solar energy or geothermal energy. Because they require less energy to heat a room than the traditional radiators, in-floor heating is considered more efficient and environmentally friendly than traditional heating.
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