Heating foils for electric floor heating

Warning!

Correctly designed electric floor heating is, undeniably, one of the most luxurious and effective ways of heating. It has been used in Scandinavia on a wide scale since the 1990s, particularly with the arrival of what are known as laminate and wooden floating floors. A sign of customer satisfaction is not only the ever-growing number of such products sold, but also the relatively high speed with which they are spreading to more and more new markets.

With the growing popularity of heating foils, new producers and distributors have also appeared, mainly from Asian countries. They are trying to sell similar products, often without sufficient knowledge of how to produce or install them.

Leaving aside the technical properties of these foils, which should be in use for about 40 years and yet are produced by companies with a very short history, a far more serious issue is their lack of knowledge regarding the basic rules for their installation.

Our company has tested foils with leading manufacturers of floating floors, such as Junckers, Kronospan, Egger (presentation is available here...). Quick-step and others, and it recommends heating foils for floor heating with a maximum wattage of 80 W/m² for laminate floors and 60 W/m² for wooden floors.

In contrast with this, we can see recommendations of wattages which are more than double the above values, i.e. 150–200 W/m², from Asian suppliers. These values have the direct result of jeopardizing the life span of the floor, and it needs to be taken into consideration that most floor producers do not provide any warranty for their products in such a case!

Unfortunately, these days we are encountering unhappy users of such badly designed floors more and more frequently, and in some cases, not only the floor covering is damaged or destroyed but also the insulation layers – see the photo.

Jeseník, April 2012