I want heated floors so bad. This looks amazing.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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it is the best and I wish I could have it in every place I live.
Speaking as a guy in construction, this gives me anxiety. How about a nice radiant electric heater hanging on the wall? Wood burning stove?
Having held my ear against a finished wood floor to listen for the leak, I concur. I'm sure there's a good way to do this, but I've only seen bad ways.
Well electricity costs around 0.30€ per kWh and you need at least 4-6kw to heat that area and a heat pump that produces the same amount of heat uses 1-1.2kw of electricity for the same amout of heat. And well a fireplace is under heavy regulation here in Germany because of the dust and emissions.
The industrious Tekkit base:
Why the very dense section on the left (hallway?)?
Every line in needs a line out. Looks like they lead toward the photographer.
The red lines are the spaces where the people that build the walls might drill, it's that dense because behinde me in that picture there are 3 rooms with together 6 loops and in the middle left behind the wall is the manifold
Doesn’t this require extra distribution box back there to reduce density of pipes in the hallway?
The hallway itself doesn't has a loop on it's own so we heat it with the entrance pipes of the different rooms
They started on the far end and when they got to behind the camera, they realized how many lines they still had to run to that area and the amount of space in the hallway to feed that area didn't line up with the spec for the spacing in the room. Instead of ripping out what they had done, they just increased the density.
Same thing as when you're signing your name on a birthday card and the first few letters are huge, but the you've gotta shrink the rest to fit before you run out of paper.
I'd agree with you on it being a hallway. I'd also guess the red mark out is for a demising wall.
distribution maybe?
Ask the installers to bleed it properly or you will have MANY restless nights.
I'm the installer lmao. We got a system with an high power pump cycles every loop multiple times and dumps it in an open container before we connect the heat pump
Is there anything a guy can do about a system like this that gets loud as hell whenever a certain loop is active?
Flushing it helps, try closing the return side to the system and drain water from the manifold while also filling it from your heater, hope you got a drain nearby tho because you gone flush every loop by its on for bit after and presumably you did it right and long enough the air should be gone and it's as quiet as it gets
Thank you for actually doing your job!
Awesome. Thank you for sharing!
What is the final fill liquid? Is there an anti bio/anti corrosion agent?
Just desalted water from our osmosis machine
Not worried about anything growing in there?
I mean it's an "airless" closed loop with 95% clean h2o. The water may gets darker after time from bacteria dieing but there will probably never grow anything concerning
Is there any reason you won't add an anti microbial additive, like antifreeze or something? We usually add stuff in computer water cooling loops, but I'll grant that microfin heatsinks are much easier to gum up, but still, not sure there's a downside.
I build a few water-cooled systems in my life and I know where you're coming from but this is a bit different, instead of fins a heat pump uses a plate heat exchanger and all pipes are at least 22mm wide, a thin bacteria film would do basically nothing in the grand scheme also because it's desalted water there are just a few bacteria colonies left that gone die in an "airless" (in quation because it's in an engineering sense airless not in an physical sense) system without any food in a few weeks to days. Also an anti microbial agent could be aggressive against some materials in the loop and one that isn't should be rather expensive. Especially in that volume of water. We're talking about an office building with an attached workshop. Together with the buffers it should add up to 3000l of water in circulation. Having roughly 10% of an agent that is probably expensive and really doesn't do anything would be not that efficient.
TL:Dr: cost/efficiency factor isn't there to begin with
So, dumping it into an open container is a way to remove bubbles from the line? You wait for the water to come out without bubbles, and that means the line is full? How do you connect the pump without introducing bubbles? Is it submerged in the open container? Then you pull the line down into the water as it's running and connect it?
It's an open container and a submittable pump (usually used for lifting ground water from 100m) that pumps it from the bottrem of the container into the loop and when it comes back from the loop it gets dumped on top of the water line, since the pump transport around 3500l/h we let a single loop with roughly 5-15l circulate for roughly 15mins before we switch to the next (English is my second language so please ignore the grammar mistakes)
Submersible pump, I think you mean. Good on you learning English, it's hard.
So in-floor is water pipes? I thought it was done by electrical wires. But if pipes are how we'd warm our driveway (if we had one; apartment scum here with a basement garage) then I guess pipes are good inside too.
Do we worry about earthquakes? Would we be better off with radiant in-ceiling heat instead for that?
My farfar was a cabinet maker, my dad was a woodworker, floor layer, tiler, etc, but I'm a nerd and have none of those artisanal skills. This is interesting as heck and it's a connection to my vestigial roots.
Here in Germany we never really got earthquake and even the hardest we got in the last hundred years just rattled some roof tiles off. Also it's very common in Europe to use floor heating (due to the lower temperatures you need to provide and such beeing more efficient with heat pump)in neuer buildings so mostly everyone does it
There is also electrical wire floor heating it's cheaper, water is more efficient though
Just to clarify for people reading this: electrical wire floor heating is cheaper to install. Running costs (heating cost) are cheaper with water, especially when using a heat pump.
hot water for heating is what you call radiators, which are pretty common around the world
how long does it take to start warming up? That seems like a long loop, or is it multiple loops?
They are 17 individual loops it usually takes up to a day till the floor has its initial temperature after that temperature changes take not longer than 30mins
We have in floor heating and I love it.
Does it break? What are the bills like?
Is it pipes or wires?
It's a flat. I honestly don't know.
Nice until it fails.
Yeah everything is. Lasts 50+ years which, IDK if you've ever had a furnace replacement, but they're not cheap and easy especially if it's tucked somewhere weird.
50+ years? I have yet to see one last more than about 10 before needing to be replaced or fixed. Most often just shut off and go back to traditional heating. Our new-to-us home is about 25 years old and the previous owner said most of the in floor heating was already shot when they bought it 12 years ago.
Our house is over 40 years old and has under-floor heating since the beginning. It's still working like a charm. We connected our heatpump a few years ago, it's working like it always has. The same with my parents house: 40 years old under-floor heating, still working without flaws.
10-15 until it leaks and destroys everything.
I mean I work since 10 year in this job and I never heard of any spontaneous leaking and well we never thrown a system out because of that