You are probably familiar with floor heat registers in that they are present in almost every home with a heating system. They are simply an outlet for heat that is blow through the ductwork in the home from the furnace or heat pump. In other words, they are an outlet for forced air.
But what about when you have something such as radiant floor heating, do you need to utilize the registers in your floors?
The answer to this is that you don’t. Your forced air system will utilize these registers. The idea behind using radiated heat is for your forced air system to be utilized less, therefore saving you money.
When you have radiant floor heating installed in your home, your floor tiles act as your floor heat registers. This is because the heat is released through the ceramic tile that is part of the system and this heat is released immediately. You can walk across this tile floor barefoot and not worry about the floor being cold. It will be very warm to the touch and that very heat radiates into the rest of the room. It is not like your forced air system that forces air to the ceiling.
So you don’t have to worry about any floor registers getting in the way of you having a cozy home. Instead of air being forced out of one side of a room, you can have the same amount of heat being radiated at the same time from your entire floor. You just have to figure out what kind of radiant heating system you need. You have the old fashioned boiler system method, which involves tubes of water running underneath the floor. You also have the electric cable system that warms your flooring with cable, and you have the low-voltage screen system that uses a type of screen containing cables underneath the floor. The possibilities are quite incredible.