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radiant sub-floor panels

I have wanted radiant heat in my home for as long as I can remember. It is an incredibly efficient way to heat your home, but is also one of, if not the most expensive to install…at least that’s how it used to be. The install used to by a plumber laying out rolls of pex and zip tie-ing or stapling the pex to the sub-floor, which took hours and those hours cost money. With Ecowarm, that goes away, as they provide pre-grooved plywood that is wrapped in aluminum (read: super conductive), so I get a few benefits here…
1) greatly reduced labor cost because the plumber can literally just snap the pex into the back-cut grooves and it stays in place with no additional fastener.
2) aluminum is something like 1,500 times more conductive than wood, so the metal helps to spread the heat across the floor for a more even heat…in the below images you can obviously still see where the water lines are, as they are the hottest, but you can also see that the orange slowly fades to the cooler purple areas…that is the conductivity. Without Ecowarm you would just see a hard orange line with no heat dissipation left and right.
3) when you decide to work with these guys you send them your floor plans and they send you a CAD layout back of how the panels should be laid out, so your plumber doesn’t need to figure anything out…its just a kind of paint by number install (see plan at bottom of the page)
4) and lastly, this grooved plywood is 3/4 thick, the same thickness as a standard sub-floor, so if you think about it; yes, you pay more for the Ecowarm, but you also don’t need to put down another sub-floor, your framer follows the CAD drawing I mentioned above, and then your plumber clicks the pex into place.
Its pretty badass. If you’re in the market for radiant I highly recommend looking into these guys. And maybe the best part, is that they are super nice to work with. You can check out my Deep Dive interview with them below and you can just see how passionate they are about what they do…even after 30+ years in the business!

Ecowarm radiant board

Ecowarm RadiantBoard is a radiant floor heating aluminum laminated panel heat transfer system designed to be used over a sub-floor or when properly installed, over cement. It creates the pathway into which 1/2″ radiant PEX tubing is placed. When warm water is circulated through the PEX tubing, the heat is transferred to the efficient, fast responding Ecowarm RadiantBoard, the flooring materials and then radiated to the heated space providing luxurious silent, even heat. It can be used under almost any floor covering.

Ecowarm RadiantBoard is the best balance of high-performance, cost and environmental responsibility in the radiant floor heating market.