Our Guide to Basement Floor Heating

Often thought of as the coldest room in any home, basements offer excellent multi-purpose potential. But their year-round chill can be uninviting. Now you can install electric radiant floor heat and turn your cold basement into a comfortable space while adding value to your home. Warm Your Floor’s expert recommendations will help you create a cozy space in even the chilliest part of your home with almost any floor type.

The Benefits of Heating Basement Floors

Basements are known for their year-round chill, but radiant floor heating can change that. By providing even heat distribution, heated floors create a warm, inviting atmosphere from the ground up—making your basement a space you and your family will enjoy, no matter the season. 

Electric radiant heating is an efficient way to warm your basement. Unlike traditional heating systems that waste energy heating unused areas, radiant floor heating can be zoned, so you only warm the areas you use. With programmable thermostats, you can schedule heating to fit a schedule and save energy.

Basements are often susceptible to moisture and humidity, which can be discomforting and even lead to mold growth. Radiant heating helps reduce moisture by warming floors and creating a drier, healthier environment for your family.

Floor Types & Heating Options

Warm Your Floor carries products for almost any floor type you choose. Pick your favorite and we can suggest a product to warm up those chilly basements to help transform it into a comfortable place to enjoy all year long.

Tile and Stone

Beautiful tile and stone may seem like odd choices for an already chilly basement. But despite their reputation for being cold on bare feet, tile and stone are durable, easy to heat, and offer the most product options. In fact, you can choose from all indoor cables and mats we carry, along with membranes that manage moisture and have uncoupling properties to help keep tile from shifting and cracking. 

Laminate/Click-Together/Floating

With so many styles available, laminate or click-together floors are a popular choice for basements. We recommend QuietWarmth film to heat them. The thin film doesn’t add height and distributes heat to your floor evenly. Best of all, you won’t need self-leveling compound or mortar. Simply unroll the film on your concrete or other subfloor and lay the flooring on top.

Wood

Wood’s unmatched natural beauty makes it a timeless choice, but not all wood floors (like nail-down hardwood) can be used with electric radiant heat. For glue-down hardwood, choose between Nuheat and SunTouch cables, standard-size or custom mats, and convenient kits. Both brands require a layer of self-leveling concrete (SLC) over the top. Or skip the SLC with ultra-thin QuietWarmth Peel and Stick film.

For engineered hardwood floating floors, we recommend a QuietWarmth film that is specially designed for click-together flooring, no SLC required.

Carpet

Electric radiant heat can even be installed under carpet! We want to help you heat any space in your home, which is why we carry a wide range of carpet-friendly cable and mat products. Always follow manufacturer guidelines or reach out to one of our experts with product questions.

Costs & Budgeting for Heated Flooring

When considering radiant floor heating for your home, understanding the costs involved is an important step in the buying process. The total cost depends on factors like the size of your space, the type of flooring you’re heating, and the radiant heating system you choose.

Material costs vary by product type. Heating mats and cables are typically priced by square foot, with mats being slightly more expensive due to their ease of installation. Programmable thermostats add to the upfront investment but provide energy savings in the long run. 

Don’t forget to factor in operating costs. Radiant floor heating is energy-efficient, especially in basements where heat rises and stays concentrated. By having a programmable thermostat, you can minimize energy usage and costs by setting the system to run only when needed. 

To avoid unexpected expenses, it’s important to work with a trusted supplier like Warm Your Floor. Our team can provide you with a personalized quote and product recommendations tailored to your basement’s size, layout, and flooring type to help you plan your project.

Heated Basements in New Build Homes

If you’re building a home and are ready to pour concrete in your brand-new basement, take the opportunity to install in-slab heating products within your slab floor. Then, when it’s time to finish your basement, you can choose from limitless flooring options ­­– even carpet – because any floor covering can be installed over the heated slab.

For in-slab heating that offers ultimate flexibility, we recommend SunTouch SlabHeat or Warmup cable. These durable products are laid out across the basement area before concrete is spread over the top. Concrete can be polished or stained, or choose any floor type you like to finish after the concrete has cured.

Heat can be added to existing slab floors before applying a layer of self-leveling concrete for coloring, staining or polishing. We recommend SunTouch mats or WarmWire cable. Lay out the product of your choice, and then pour self-leveling concrete over the top to embed the heating cable or mats.

Special Considerations for Basements

Most indoor floor heating products we carry can be used for basements, depending on the floor type you choose. But basement floors may require watts per square foot for higher heat output to counteract the naturally colder temperatures underground and reach the desired temperature faster. 

For some products, including SunTouch, Warmup and SlabHeat cables, and Nuheat cable and custom mats, spacing wires closer together can help achieve higher heat output, increasing to 15 watts per square foot from the standard 12. 

This is an important consideration when heating large floors because it lowers the maximum coverage areas. Other manufacturers and many of our mats don’t allow or offer this option, so be sure to check specs when choosing the right product for your project.

Ready to Get Your Basement Floor Heated?

Warm Your Floor is the go-to source for all your basement heating needs. Our team is dedicated to providing tailored recommendations and quotes to ensure you get exactly what you need for your project. We make the process simple by helping you find the right materials, select the right products, and troubleshoot any issues that arise.

Ready to get started? Contact Warm Your Floor today or request a quote and get everything you need for your basement heating project.