Laying Infloor Radiant Tubing for Our Log Home

We’ve got less than a full day to lay the tubing for our radiant heating system. Just the two of us - with a lot of great advice and a little experience.

Heading Into the Log Home Building Site

With two boxes of tubing, a secondary roll of 6×6 reinforcing wire, crimping tools, tube cutters, bags of zip ties, and two manifolds in the back of my truck I headed into the property prepared to work.

Jason Hoover of ICF Building Solutions was already on-site with his team, running the last bits of rebar through the Logix block and ensuring that everything was in place and ready to go. He also cut out my office window and our walls became a ‘home’ from this one small act.

Laying the In-Floor Radiant Heating Tubes

Keeping the tubing 1 foot apart on each pass at the frost wall, and 2 feet apart for the remaining space, Eric and I worked together in 90 degree heat for quite a few hours. As he laid the tubing, I zip tied it to the reinforcing wire - then walked behind and snipped off the long ends of the zip ties.

We had decided not to heat the floor directly below the foyer - providing a ‘cold room’ of sorts that we would be using in the future as a pantry.

In the photo below you’ll see a small section of my soon-to-be office window, as well as a sample corner of the pex pipe (in floor tubing).

Both the reinforcing wire and the pex are laid directly over the 3′ deep footings for our load bearing supports and wall - shown in the photo below.

All tubes meet in the middle (more or less) along the load bearing center wall. These open tubes will be attached to two sets of manifolds - each with their own temperature controls (photos later).

We also roughed in bathroom for the basement as shown in the photo below. To the left of this is our floor drain (not shown in the photo).

Here’s a quick shot taken from outside the house as we finish up for the day. This is the view looking in the window. Notice the height of the basement walls (Eric, although hunched over, stands at 6′ 5″). Also notice the storm clouds about ready to explode on us in the next few minutes.