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Lets say you have a cold ceramic tile floor and you hate
walking barefooted on it. If you want the floor heated,
you
can rip it all apart, lay special heating cable, pour
concrete,
lay tiles again. Or you could just cut grooves inbetween
the
tiles with some disc grinder/cutter into some
1cm deep
and
then lay thin electric heating cable into the grooves and
fill
the grooves with filler again. Both ends of the cable
would
end somewhere in the box on the wall where controlling
would take place. I see only two issues-cutting the
grooves
without damaging tiles and possibility of tiles unsticking
off
the glue due to thermal differences between center and
borders of tiles. Also thin heating cable is neded, but
that
isnt impossible.
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Annotation:
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Grinding away the grout without damaging the tile is no problem, nor is
embedding the heating wire in new grout. I'm wondering if the warm wires
would heat the adjacent tiles sufficiently to make it worthwhile. |
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Hey something I actually know!
The heat usually only penetrates up to an inch and a half on either side of an in-floor heat wire so standard spacing is in three inch tracks and both ends of the wire need to terminate in the same location.
Your idea will work but the centers of every tile will remain cold. |
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Either the cable has to be thin enough to turn next to another cable in the grout space or more tiles have to be missed out. |
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Thermal energy is going to equalize, dropping as you move further away from heat max. If the tile doesn't accept the heat, the air above the tile will. Both give what you want, a warmth in the room at floor level for your phalanges. |
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Grinding away grout (oh thats what its called) will not be
enough-we need some 1 cm depth for the cable to be
deep enough, to have enough concrete to give heat to
and to fill enough new grout. I was thinking about some
machine with disk, on wheels, that could cut away the
material, because tiles are brittle and one wrong move
would chip off a very sharp corner. As to cable
thickness, I managed to find some 2.9mm thick wire on
alibaba. In my home gaps are some 4mm wide so wire
would surely fit. Can anybody tell me about tiles
comming of the glue due to thermal differences? |
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//Can anybody tell me about tiles coming off the glue due to thermal differences?// |
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The glue is called mortar and it is just modified concrete. If bonded properly then heat or frost isn't an issue depending on the body of the tile itself.
You can use unmodified mortar on a concrete substrate but it is not recommended for heat wire installations. |
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All grout removal systems suck and you risk chipping tiles at any moment of a several hours long task. It's nerve wracking, and when you think you're finished you have to go back over the entire job and pick away at the little bits of grout still clinging to the bevelled edges.
Unless you're installing 3 inch wide tiles you'll only heat up the edges of the tiles I tells ya. |
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I'm with [2fries]* - doing this over any significant area will be a nightmare, and you won't get good heat distribution. |
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It would be much, much faster to simply remove the tiles, lay a heating element, then lay new tiles. |
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*Only in this matter, you understand. |
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It seems to me that some kind of rail for the grout-removing
tool (similar to those used with handheld circular saws)
could help guide it along the proper line to remove the
grout without impacting the tiles. That's the kind of thing
that I generally assume already exists if there's a need for
it. |
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I just worry about the cleaning lady being electrocuted while trying to mop the the floor. Or the owner dropping a full cup of coffee onto the heating grid. |
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So use a liquid in-floor heating system? That's what's in my
house and it's never had a problem. The tubes were pretty
narrow, IIRC, so it might not be impossible to fit them
between the tiles. |
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Lay out the heating grid in a 'pretty' design, pour clear resin
over the top? |
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For those, who are afraid of electrocution-"residual current
device" would protect from any electric shock (google it). |
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Also, for what does LVP stand? |
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Alternately one could heat water to a comfortable temperature and
irrigate the existing floor with a recirculating pump during the cooler
months. The baseboards and cabinetry would certainly suffer as would
any adjacent carpeting, but there's nothing quite like standing in warm
water during a nocturnal trip to the fridge. |
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What about a strip heat light that can be instaledl all around the skirting. Heat your tiles with minimum installation disturbance. Hopefully the angles could be gained to have total coverage. |
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And if you really wanted , every second light element could be a different colour. Disco into that morning shower. |
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I know it's not fun, but no one need get electrocuted
if you use low voltage! With low voltage (higher
current) the Ni-chrome wire itself will be thicker, but
it wouldn't need special insulation. This means it
could be directly inserted into a very fine slot in the
grout or whateverhaveyou. |
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To keep your feet warm, you'll just have to learn to
walk on the cracks. |
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