How to Install a Heated Floor | Bathroom Remodel Part 6

hey there on this week's episode of golden key design i'm going to show you how i installed this heated floor let's get to it so for this installation i'm going to be using the schluter ditra heat kit this comes with everything that you'll need and costs only about 500 for the entire kit the first step is installing the ditra heat uncoupling membrane these are these big orange mats and that's what will go on to the subfloor and then you can attach your tile directly to the top of it the key feature of this membrane is that unlike durock it uncouples the subfloor from your tile install and that way if your subfloor moves your tile won't move and it won't be prone to cracking or the grout having to crack as well also these ditra heat mats have the studs on top which allow the heating cable to sit inside of nice and secure and that way it's not moving all over the place while you install your tile the way you install these is by using the schluter all-set or you can use any unmodified mortar and you're going to first burn it into the plywood by using the flat side of the trowel and then you can come back with the groove side to create those grooves and then you can put the membrane on top of that you're going to want to apply pressure to make sure it fully sinks all those ridges by using a float or you can just use your body weight and just kind of walk over the mat like i did all right it's now time to start laying out our heating cable it's designed to go perfectly in between each of these studs so it's held down in place there are a few rules to keep in mind you want to stay about seven studs away from your toilet flange as if you don't want it to melt the wax ring you also want to stay about four studs away from an hvac vent so that's not overheating that area and also you don't want to use it in dead space where people won't be walking for instance if you have a vanity that's sitting on the floor it doesn't make sense to heat underneath that so the cable is a specific length and you can't cross over itself so you have to be kind of careful how you lay it out and make sure that you use all of it and use it in the right areas so it might take some trial and error but let's get started so you can use your hand to apply the heating cable into the detroit heat mat and it'll kind of just pop into place as you see i did there some people like to use a float to kind of push it in but i found using my fingers actually worked best another tip is that when you lay out your ditra heat mat you want all the studs to line up with one another from one mat to the next that way when you lay out your heating cable it doesn't have to make a zigzag across the pattern it can just go straight across and as i mentioned before these cables come at a specific length and you can't extend it or shorten it in any way so you have to plan ahead and make sure you get the right size heating cable for your space schluter does have a calculator on their website that allows you to help calculate what cable would work best for your bathroom or for your bedroom or wherever you're heating the floor however i would err on the side of caution and always probably get the smaller cable as opposed to the larger one if you're debating between two sizes and at this point i realized i had made a mistake in my layout of the cable but it was easy enough just to pull it right back up and i didn't have too much to pull up as if the mistake was only one row back however this took about five minutes to pull up and then reapply it however with other heating cables these might already be glued or nailed down and it's gonna be a lot more work to readjust the cable so for reasons like that i really like this heating cable as it's pretty diy friendly also i realized i had some mortar here that was stuck in the studs so i just used my utility knife just to pick it out and make sure the heating cable was still flush with the very top of the studs and as you can see i'm leaving three studs in between each row of cable this is the minimum recommended distance by schluter and at this point i stopped just to reassess as i had about a quarter of the cable left and i wanted to make sure i used it in the right spaces i was actually most concerned about the toilet because as i mentioned before you can actually melt the wax ring if the cable gets too close to it so i wanted to stay far enough away from that happening but also i wanted to stay close enough so that when you're sitting on the throne both your feet are nice and toasty but i think i was able to achieve that in the end and that bottom section of the screen on the bottom right no one's really going to step there so i wasn't too worried about that particular area but all in all i think i got the perfect length cable and was able to cover all of the bathroom that i wanted to with the heating element and i'm really happy with how it turned out now let's get to tiling i've already done a two-part video series on tying the entire first floor of this lake house project so if you want a little bit more detail on the process please go ahead and check out that video i'll link it up in the top right hand corner but here's a pretty cool shot of cutting out the toilet flange after knocking those off by hand i came back with the angle grinder to clean up the edge however the toilet ended up covering up most of this cut anyway then i went ahead and pre-cut all of my tiles i basically dry fit them in the room and i find that this is the best workflow to make sure that everything's already ready to go when you mix up your mortar and you're not waiting on cutting tiles while your mortar starts to dry out [Music] then once all of those were cut we could finally get to actually mixing up that mortar and start to lay tile as you can see i am burning that schluter all-set into the ditra heat filling in all those gaps and basically getting a flat surface then i came back and added some water on top of that to then create the group surface to then lay the tile on here you want to be a little bit careful as you don't want to damage the heating cable with your trowel as it potentially could cut through the cable i was pretty much just using my trowel as normal and i didn't have any problems so as long as you're not extremely aggressive i don't foresee it being a problem for you and as you can see here i'm cleaning up all that mortar on the underside of those tiles as at this point i wanted to move to the left side of the room and stop going down onto the right and you just want to make sure you clean up all that mortar if you are going to stop in a particular area because you don't want it to build up and harden and then when you go to lay your tile down the line it'll cause a lot more problems so just a heads up there i'm also probably going to get a lot of comments on why i didn't use levelers here i normally do use levelers but with this particular tile i found that it was just easiest to do by hand and by eye and i got pretty good results so i don't think levelers are needed in every case sometimes with wall tile it's a little bit more needed but with this floor tile it wasn't too bad now the heating kit comes with two temperature sensors as you can see there's one on the left there that black wire you want to put that in the middle of your row so it's getting an average temperature of the heat around it and this is what helps to signify whether the floor needs to be heated or needs to be turned off and here we realize that we put the wrong tile down so i just was able to pull it back up luckily we found it pretty quickly while the mortar was still wet put it in its right position over on the right hand side cleaned up the mortar and went back to the left so even if you pre-cut all your tiles and lay them out perfectly you are going to make mistakes and they're pretty much inevitable everyone makes them so you're not alone and when it comes to the electrical side of this install i'm not going to cover in too much detail as you're probably going to want to hire a licensed electrician to do that however and generally speaking basically you're going to feed the ends of the heating cable up the wall into a single gang electrical box from there you'll connect it to the included thermostat and then give it some power and it's pretty much a plug and play from there also i opted for the wifi thermostat so i'll be able to adjust the temperature from my phone as well [Music] [Music] hold on [Music] all right you gotta you can clean up right [Music] once all the spacers were removed we could then start grouting i made sure to wet the surface and then we could apply our black grout in this case it's common to see white grout with this sort of tile but i think the black came out really nice as well if you want to learn a lot more about the grinding process i'm going to refer you again back to my other videos which i've covered in a lot more detail i'll link those again in the top right hand corner because in this video we're going to cover it kind of briefly after letting the grout dry we could then clean it with a sponge and here i'm actually showing you the shower pan as opposed to the floor tile because i don't have a shot of me actually cleaning the floor tile so you're going to get a sneak peek at next week's video we're going to actually be covering all the tile work in the entire shower but here you're just going to see the pan so you get a little sneak peek for making it this far into the video once that was clean we could then install the hvac vent and then i also installed the thermostat into the single gang outlet as i mentioned before and i just wanted to show you guys a couple of the features of this thermostat as you can see it provides a lot of information on this main screen it shows you the current temperature and you can increase that temperature directly from this screen and if you have the wi-fi compatible one you can also do the same thing on your phone as well as all these other features you can then adjust that temperature from here for a few hours or a few days or you can actually set it up on a schedule so let's say you wake up at the same time monday through friday the floor will turn on at that exact time and then let's say you take a nightly shower so you can turn on at that time as well and saturdays and sundays are different so you can turn on a different time because you wake up a little bit later basically what i'm trying to say is there's endless possibilities with the schedule and that way you can just set it and forget it which is really nice and that's gonna be a wrap on this week's project i hope you guys enjoyed it and learned something along the way honestly doing a heated floor for the very first time was a bit daunting and i wasn't sure how it was all gonna pan out but the schluter system made it a lot easier and i think anyone with a diy background could accomplish this project without nearly as many headaches as you might think i was also really happy to get away without having to use a threshold as the bathroom and hall tile were at the exact same height so if you enjoyed the video i'd really appreciate it if you could give it a like as it really helps out the channel and also please subscribe if you haven't already as we're going to continue more with this bathroom innovation series next week as i mentioned we're going to be covering all the tiling in the entire shower so it's going to be quite fun so get subscribed and stay tuned and as always thanks for watching and happy building see you next week

Channel: Golden Key Design

Views: 119,770

Keywords: bathroom renovation, bathroom remodel, bathroom reno, tile bathroom floor, how to tile a bathroom floor, how to tile a bathroom, tile bathroom floor diy, tile a bathroom floor installation, bathroom floor tile installation, tile a floor diy, ditra heat, heated floor systems, ditra-heat heated flooring systems, how to heat your floor, how to install a heated floor, how to heat a bathroom floor, heated floor, heated floor installation, radiant heat, radiant floor heat

Id: Mt-ZkjoBdVM

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 09 2022