How To Install Under Floor Radiant Tubing With Aluminum Omega Heat Transfer Plates Between Joists

today I'm going to show you guys how to install in-floor heating but not the kind that goes in the concrete today we're talking about the kind that goes up in between the floor joists and uses these heat plates to disperse the heat up into the subfloor so that's what we're going to talk about right now is how to pull the tubing through your floor joists and get it all organized in such a way that it's actually manageable and you can actually do this as just one person I did that entire section over there on my own having a second person is nice but I kind of almost do have a second person because of one of the tools that I have which I'll show you in just a couple minutes we're not going to actually be physically connecting this to the boiler just yet that's going to be in an upcoming video so make sure you subscribe if you want to see that video in the future you always need to pay attention to the type of flooring that you're putting on top of the subfloor manufacturers have recommendations on what temperatures that flooring material is able to handle so keep that in mind as well we're going to get started right now drilling holes through our floor joists and point the PEX tubing into each joist cavity but then we'll come back and talk about how to calculate the square footage and number of feet that you'll need for the pecs as well as some of the tools and parts required [Music] so to the center we're putting our whole six inches in and three inches down from the top a quick way to mark them is to make marks on a pencil so six inches this is three inches so all we have to do is go like this look where we've got the market here right there three inches right there the main thing is you have to be down far enough that you're not going to have any screws coming from the top that are going to be hitting that hole or from the end generally you want to stay away from the end because that reduces the strength of the board so staying six inches the center is a pretty good middle ground in my opinion we're using a Milwaukee hole hog for this or a super hog would work well I don't really recommend using a smaller drill but you could maybe get by with one if you weren't doing too big of a project thank you the size of holes we're drilling is a little over two inches in this case but around two inches is perfect one of the keys is to not drill these holes too small if you drill them too small you're going to just have a frustrating experience so don't drill them so big that you're compromising the structural Integrity of the joists but two or two and a half inches is about right in order to pull through really nice and smoothly you're going to have at least two hex lines running through those holes that you're going to drill but you might even have more than that if you're closer to the boiler room you might have a couple of sets going out because you can only run so many feet with half inch pecs before you have to start a new Loop all right you guys ready to see my second person that never says anything but is extremely helpful here he is right here we need to give him a name comment down below we should name this guy this thing makes this process way easier handling a huge roll of pecs is super inconvenient if you've ever done it before we've got a thousand foot roller what you to be a thousand foot roll of half inch oxygen barrier PEX tubing it's important that it is oxygen barrier because otherwise oxygen can get through regular pecs and damage the boiler components we are now ready to pull the PEX tubing through all of the holes until we get to the area where we're actually going to be deploying these into the floor joists so that all starts right here at the PEX tubing unroller if you don't have one of these you're going to have to have somebody manually unroll it don't unspool it off the end because it can become kind of Tangled and it's not good for the pipe you want to unroll it like what this is doing here typically you can find like thousand foot rolls and 300 foot rolls as a pretty standard option personally I kind of like the thousand foot rule because if I need to cut off the pipe just a few feet short or a few feet long it's not going to be a big deal it's going to work just fine and it gives you a tiny bit more flexibility plus it tends to be just a little bit cheaper per foot however buying 300 foot rolls is also so a fantastic option because then you for sure can't mess up the length if you have someone helping you and all of a sudden you're at 400 feet that's not a good thing either so I'll link to both of 300 Footers and the Thousand Footers now we're going to be pulling our pecs past the area that we're not going to be heating with this Loop over to the area where we are heating with this Loop and as soon as we reach the first joist cavity that we're going to be heating based on our square footage then we are going to create a little Loop and then go to the next one and create another loop and the next one and create another loop and continue to do that through all of the joists until you get to the very end of the area that you're going to be heating once you get to the end you're going to make one final Loop in the last joist cavity and then you're going to take that end pipe that you just created at that Loop and begin running it straight back through all the way back wherever your boiler or heating system is located now that we've got it pulled all the way back into our boiler room here you can see we've got these runs that are ready to be tied into the manifold and we just pulled a length of tubing into here that's going to be big enough to reach the spot where we're mounting the manifolds right over here this is going to be fixed in place essentially we're not going to be pulling this tube back and forth this is the one we just pulled through and we're not going to be feeding this back and forth anymore we're just going to continue to pull tubing from the roll as we need to fill out each one of those joist cavities sometimes these are referred to as Omega plates because of the shape of the end of the tube by far the fastest way to Anchor these in place is going to be with some sort of a staple gun now the statement again that I'm using is it this Milwaukee t50 stapler and this thing is done absolutely fantastic for this application we're shooting half inch staples so that we get a really good bite up into the ceiling material which in this case is just three quarter inch plywood uh one cool thing about this stapler is that if you pull and hold the trigger you're ready for rapid fire so you can just hold the trigger down and go after it and sunk those Staples pretty much flush you can also adjust how stiff this is as far as how hard this wax the Staples in so I've got this set all the way so that it's going to pound the Staples in as much as possible so with these half inch t50 staples they're not just going to come loose see if these ones will pull up all the Staples stayed in the piece of wood so I'm really confident with this uh method of anchoring these plates so this is our line that goes all the way back to the mechanical room and that's fixed in place on the opposite end near the manifold now We've ran this down back so this is the end of our first section here and you'll see we've got a little bit of extra but all we have to do is pull this back until we have just the right amount for this one section that we need right here and that's the concept that we're going to keep doing going forward this next one we're not going to have quite enough so we're gonna have to pull more from over there to fill this next joist cavity one thing you can do to improve heat transfer and reduce noise for the system is to put about a quarter inch bead of silicone down the middle of each one of your tubes just a small bead all the way across and then wait for it to get tacky and then proceed to install them as normal doing that will reduce the clicking that you might hear when the system turns on and off which is basically the expansion of the PEX you might be able to hear just a tiny bit of noise as that happens and you probably will either way but adding the silicone definitely can help a lot another way to make this sort of installation a little bit quieter is to use a system that keeps the PEX tubing at a constant temperature instead of turning it on and turning it off personally I'm not really that concerned about that it doesn't really bother me but some people really want it to be perfectly quiet so if you want it to be as quiet as possible take those extra steps add a little bit of silicone each one of those heat plates and consider using a system that doesn't have the standard on off feature but rather will just vary the temperature of the tubing gradually and continually alright at this point you can see the way we are deploying our tubing into the joist cavities you can see that tube it's going straight across that one actually goes to this plate that was the first one that we had to Anchor in place so that run right there was our determining Factor so we anchored those three plates and we pulled the correct amount of tubing to allow us to loop back and run it back on the second side right here and then from there it goes into our next joist cavity so we got one two three and then back one two three and we continue that same process there are two extremely important things that you need to be aware of when you're anchoring these plates the first one is that you want to give a little bit of space in between the ends of the plates the recommendation is about three inches but I think we might be a tiny bit more than that the main thing is just give a little bit of space between each plate as you're anchoring them down the way the second thing to pay attention to is the area where the tubing exits the plates you want to make sure that right here where the tube comes out is not really a harsh angle at all because when this PEX heats up and cools down it's going to expand and contract a little bit and if there's a sharp turn immediately or there's a lot of pressure going to the side that can cause a lot of issues with potentially damaging the pecs so you want to do your best to space these out as evenly as possible with there being two per joist cavity obviously we're going to end up with that eight inches on Center between each one of the tubes what I did is figure out how wide our plates are which in this case they're about four inches wide and what I found is that if you hold the plates in about an inch from each one of the studs you end up with a fairly even spacing between each one of the plates so that you end up with close to that eight inches on Center between each one now it's also important in my opinion to allow the loops to go across to the opposite side of the next joist Bay you get a much gentler sweep on your pecs going from one side to the other you can see that right here where it actually goes through the joists it's actually going fairly straight and we're not pushing really tight up against the edge of this hole so by doing that consistently we end up with a really nice gradual bend on this end with no pressure up against the sides of the holes that we drilled in some cases you're not going to be able to avoid a little bit more of a tighter Bend if you have a spot where the PEX is pulled tightly up against the edge of the wood there's a chance that over time as that PEX heats up and cools down it could kind of move back and forth on that wood and potentially damage the pecs so make sure any tight spots like that that you add some sort of a sleeve there are lots of different options that will work I'll link down in the description to a few different ways that you can do it they make some pre-made like little inserts that you can use but just keep in mind that you don't want the pecs to be pulled tightly through framing members you want it to be able to have a little bit of wiggle room so that it's not going to be you know up tight against the wood so right now you can see that this particular Loop is too short this is what's going to come straight out into the joist cavity just like this so we're going to pull this out and anchor it in place just like those ones are so in order to make that work we can't pull any tubing from this direction right here because that's anchored and that's the return side going back we need to pull more from the supply side so we're just going to continue to do that same process that we were doing earlier where we just pull right here this is coming off of the PEX tubing on roller in the other room and then we'll work it all the way down through all these Loops until we get to that joist cavity and we get enough tubing to pull this out anchor it in place and we'll be good to go another thing that has come in extremely handy in this project these things make it really convenient to walk back and forth and line up with the joist cavity that you happen to be working on now when you're in the process of ordering what you need for this job you're also going to want to calculate how many feet of pecs you're going to need and the way you do that if you're using eight inches on Center for spacing like we've got right here then you're going to multiply the square footage by 1.5 and that's going to give you the tubing length that you need to cover the area that you're working with if you're doing a spacing other than eight inches on Center just know that if you're using like a standard wood subfloor you do not want to go any less than eight inches on Center so right what we have here is optimal if you had 24 inch on Center like floor Joyce for whatever reason you would actually have to put three in each joist cavity which is going to be kind of crowded but you can make it work if you went with like 12 inches on Center you'll probably just end up with a system that's not quite as even as far as your floor heating and you'd have a little bit reduced BTU output once you've calculated the total tubing length required based on the spacing of your installation you'll have to add a little bit more for a couple of different reasons the first one is that looping these back and forth like this takes a little bit of extra pipe to do so so you're going to have to add a little bit for that and then the second thing is your supply and return run so this that one that's going straight across that one is not heating any of the floor really that's just going back to the mechanical room over there the same thing with the supply coming out to the first one so those lengths need to be incorporated into your calculation so if you had a for loop system after multiplying the square footage by 1.5 you would actually end up needing to do five Loops by the time you account for for the lines going to and from the mechanical room or wherever the boiler is located as well as the additional footage that you use going back and forth on the ends of all of your runs these videos are a ton of work to make so if you found this video to be useful so far I'd really appreciate it if you just smash that like button and subscribe down below for more videos like this one one of the bad things about working by yourself is that you can't see what's happening on the other end of wherever you're pulling your pecs from so check it out right up here you see the issue right here we've got a pretty bad Kink I was talking to somebody and pulling this tube I had plenty of extra ready to go but it just coiled itself up and then was here when I came found it it was actually pulled all the way tight all the way up to here something like that so really unfortunate but you don't have to freak out too much you definitely wouldn't want to like splice together a bunch of pieces of radiant tubing on purpose but in a situation like this it's not that big a deal we're just gonna throw one one repair in here and not have to worry about it if this were pecs a in theory you could heat this up and get it to return to its original shape but you're supposed to use like a heat gun where you can dial in the exact temperature that you need most likely you're not going to have the right stuff to do that so just crimping a coupling into here is going to be our best bet we're just using standard crimp rings for this repair since this is PEX B we wouldn't be able to use those expanding fittings the expanding fittings that they use of pexa are pretty cool because you don't have the Restriction of flow as much whereas these are smaller inside diameter than the pipe so we lose a little bit of the flow rate one cool thing about this Milwaukee curper is that you can really easily operate it with one hand you've got a trigger right here and right here if you just squeeze this one side it opens up the Jaws I'll link to this thing down below it's probably a little bit Overkill unless you're doing a lot of work but so far I've been really really glad that I have it so there we go now you know how to do a repair I figured it'd be kind of interesting to see how many times we got to bend this back and forth before it actually breaks I think it's actually already a hole right here in the corner of it so it actually didn't take that much effort to be perfectly honest so this Loop is now complete we've reached the limit of what we can do with half inch pecs we're only supposed to go about 300 feet for half inch packs per Loop so that's what we're limited to so as we pull each one of these out we were able to check and see how much we had pulled off the roll over there and once we reached about the right amount we quit so now we'll have to repeat that same process for this area here that still needs tubing and uh just going to be basically identical now you will have additional tubes running through these same holes so make sure you take that into account when you're drilling the holes how many Loops are you going to have to bring through we're going to be perfectly fine with four tubes going through this one over here but down there where we're going to have a third loop I might have to drill some separate holes might do it on the opposite end of the joists over there now that this Loop is completed we're going to line this up to the length that we need and cut it off and we'll be good to move on to the next Loop now that all of our tubing has been fully installed we are ready to insulate underneath here basically we want to leave about a three inch air gap between the top right there and wherever your insulation stops so in this case we're going to be using just standard six inch fiberglass but if you didn't have room for that another option is to use like a foil faced product either foam or that bubble stuff and staple it or anchor it in place so that it still has that three inch air gap up above it you need to have that insulation in there in order to keep the heat from moving its way down through the ceiling obviously we want everything to be going up to heat the space above this so make sure that you do a good job insulating and leaving that three inch or so air gap up above that insulation one more thing that I wanted to mention about this type of system here is that this is not going to be able to Output as much as in-floor heat in the concrete is able to Output the thermal Mass down here here and the amount of energy that this can absorb is very significant the amount of energy that this floor can absorb and dissipate up here is much less so if this were the only heat Source in this entire like building if this was the only spot that we were heating I would be a little bit concerned about it not being able to fully carry the load this is going to be perfectly fine because this entire building is heated so this is just going to be heating this space up to the temperature that it needs to be which is going to be bringing it up just a little bit from ambient since down here and all around this area is going to be a warmer temperature already so just keep that in mind I'll try to link in the description to a few different articles talking about the heat capacity of a system like this just make sure you do your research before choosing One Singular heat source to take care of an area the area that this is heating upstairs is also going to have a mini split going to it so if needed that's a great backup heat source to be able to turn on although I don't think that will really be a need unless there were some mechanical issue with this system then you do have backup it's always a good idea to plan on having a little bit of backup heat available so we've got all of our pipes pulled back to our Boiler Room location you see right over here is where we're ultimately going to be connecting that we're going to bring those lines down right here and loop them back up into a manifold I still have to mount it it's right down there so if you want to see the video on how to do that connection we're going to do a full boiler installation video so that's going to be coming up if you want to see that make sure that you hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications so that you don't miss it in the meantime I'll throw a couple of relevant boiler type videos here on the screen and we'll see you over there in just a few seconds thank you so much for watching comment down below if you have any other thoughts about radiant in-floor tubing and we'll talk to you guys in the next one see ya

Channel: Benjamin Sahlstrom

Views: 474,523

Keywords: In Floor Heat, Omega Plates, Heat Transfer, Staple Up, Radiant, Wood Floor Heating, DIY

Id: w6wo2URorG4

Length: 20min 52sec (1252 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2022