Warm Toes!
By SenselessI've had an aversion to cold ever since I got lost in the Mountains of Pennsylvania in a snowstorm for 23 hours.
That probobly explains why I live in Florida.
The floor in the Master Bath has electric heating elements embedded below the tiles and it wasn't that hard to do. I got a system that uses a long loop of wire but they also make some in matts which I suppose might be easier to layout if your room is fairly square.
The master bath has a sunken shower that I made with a sheet of heavy rubber. I used backer board on the rest of the floors to keep the elements away from the plywood subfloor and let that over lap the edges of the rubber for the shower. The heating element gets zig zagged back and forth across that, than I made a mix of portland cement and sand, with some fiberglass I got from the concrete plant. I have a mortor mixer so I got it well mixed but you could do this in a wheelbarrow.
I troweled about 5/8 of an inch of this over the entire floor and got the room sloped towards the shower drain and then came back and tiled the floor.
There is a theremostat you embed along with the wires, and it has a very simple setting of one through nine and it also has a timer so you can have it come one a certain times of the day if you wish. The sensor on the wall compares the room air tempurater to the floor temp and keeps the floor slightly above the air temp so no cold toes. I have it set so low that you wouldn't really notice it was warm, but I definately don't get any hint of a chill standing on it in bare feet. I cranked it up to test it and it got warm enough to cause the dog and cat to claim it as theirs for a day.
I think I found this on Ebay for about $500 to do about 120 square feet of the floor. The instructions said I could have run them into the shower itself safely but I didn't see the point since the running water would change the temp faster than a low current element so I only went in as far as I thought the water from the shower would stop.
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