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Tubing for the infloor heat attached to the wire mesh. |
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The infloor heat in the master bedroom on the lower level is in place. The wooden structure with all of the pipes is a central distribution point, manifold, for the tubing. |
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This is the main control center for the radiant in-floor heating system, there is no forced air heating system in this house. The heat comes from tubes in the floor, we will then pour Gypcrete 1 1/2 inches thick on the two upper levels of the house, this protects the tubes as well as providing a thermal mass for the heat. The hot water unit is a Lennox 'Complete Heat', and the tubes are Wirsbo cross linked, oxygen barrier, pex tubing. |
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This is the main unit for our heat recovery ventilation unit. This unit exchanges the air in the house at any number of air changes per hour. As the air is exhausted outside the incoming air is heated by the outgoing air and thus are using your warm air, it is not just vented outside. There is a vent in every room in the house. It is made by Venmar and is the AVS DUO model |
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These are the Wirsbo infloor heat tubes. They have to be stapled every 18 " with an air powered stapler. Gretchen ran the staple gun, I lined up pipe. This was one of the most nerve wracking things we have done. It was so easy to shoot the tubing, if the gun was not almost perfectly square with the tubing you shot it. If you put a staple through the pipe you cannot cut it out and put in a connector or a coupler, ha, no, you have to replace the entire section, the average length of a section is 250 feet (80 meters). We did not shoot the tubing, we worked on tubing until midnight one night. This style of tubing installation is called 'counter spiral'. This allows for the most uniform heat distribution throughout the room. It takes a little longer to install, so it is not used all that often. |
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This is the reason for working until midnight, Gypcrete was coming at 8:00AM. Gypcrete is a light weight concrete that, in our case, is used to protect the tubes and provide a thermal mass. It also acts as a sound deadener between floors. It is poured an 1 1/2 inch thick, of course this implies you have to build up every wall an extra 1 1/2 by putting another plate down to accomodate the extra floor thickness. |
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This is the floor after have been placed using a hose, sorry no pic, it comes out really runny and is therefore self leveling, we did not have any leakage between floors. We were able to walk gently on it after 4 hours. It takes 30 days to completely cure, less if you turn the heat on. |
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One of the Rehau heating manifolds. The valves on the bottom allow you to tweak the system for the perfect flow volume which of course controls the temperature. They are the fine tuning of each loop. Whereas the thermostats control an area, we have several loops in one area and these valves control each loop. |
