The primary considerations are warmth maintenance comfort durability and cost.
Making concrete floors warmer.
Concrete gets a lot of flack for making a space not feel homey enough.
In fact the problem could well be your floor especially in a room at ground level or worse yet in the basement.
Determining the cause of cold floors however is usually fairly simple and can be addressed without massive expenditure.
Cold concrete floors are a rather common problem and there are several approaches to warming them up.
Concrete floors work particularly well in.
Floors of ceramic stone or concrete are the worst culprits with hardwood a runner up.
Insulating the floors rim joists and headers can be an effective way to warm these floors.
Radiant below surface heating is the most expensive option but also the most effective.
A few are expensive or not practical.
You can expect the stone floor of your screen porch or the basement linoleum laid on cement to be cold and carpet is the logical warmer.
Some issues are structural and logical.
As it turns out polished concrete floors are a great choice in winter and are warmer than you might think.
A few are expensive or not practical for some homes.
Keep cold air out warm air in.
It will put a mist that you can not feel into the air and the heat from the furnace will heat up the mist making the house much warmer sort of like a sauna affect.
However many homeowners like the industrial look of polished concrete slab floors both have their advantages and disadvantages.
It radiates heat through the underlayment up to the top flooring layer and through the rest of the room helping your favorite spaces feel toasty even during cold.
A polished concrete floor is a high thermal mass material absorbing heat where it is exposed to sunlight.
It can actually look quite beautiful with gold metals and warmer tones.
I live in minnesota and for the past 4 days our temps have been between a high of 7 below to a low of 23 below.
Shell busey shows you how to install a concrete floor warming system delta fl.
It s a common problem in a finished basement because concrete floors continually release moisture making a basement feel damp and they act as a conductor for the cold from the ground under the foundation.
Luckily there are ways to combat this chilly predicament.
No matter how nicely the rest of the basement is finished if the floors are cold and the room feels damp nobody is going to want to spend much time down there.
Thermaldry flooring for warmer basement floors.