Your spouse got up in the dead of the night and like a shot those frozen toes are raiding your territory with the perseverance of a heat-seeking projectile. Lucky for you, the new home will be sporting radiant floor heating - a dependable cure for meetings with cold feet at 2 in the morning or a midwinter chill that touches your bone marrow.

Under-floor heating has been in use since the Roman Empire when it was in its heyday in public constructions and the villas of the well-to-do. Hot air was circulated under tile or brick, providing a radiant warmth - energy that channeled heat through the flooring and on to colder furniture like Roman recumbant chairs, statues, marble-topped desks and stoic centurions.

With the coming of flexible PEX piping in the United States in the 1980s, its use has skyrocketed as new products have been introduced for the construction industry - among which have been hydro arrangements to furnish radiant floor heat. Unlike forced-air furnaces, modern hydronic floor arrangements utilising PEX plumbing products offer more uniform heat to a room, are less drying, more effective and a whole lot quieter than past furnaces or metal steam pipes.

PEX tubing is made of cross-linked polyethylene, which gives these high tech pipes durability, chemical resistance, superior mobility, a cost-effective installment profile and bigger temperature range. This polyethylene piping can be exposed to water as hot as 200° Fahrenheit in heat schemes.

There are disparate modes of putting in radiant floor heating. Some use electric line voltage arrangements, but easy-to-use PEX hosing products have made hydronic under-floor heating popular with both home constructors and house owners. Because the hosing is so resilient, its coils can be applied in a straight distance, doing away with the requirement for multiple junctions and fittings.

Numerous radiant floor heating schemes utilize oxygen-barrier PEX radiant hosing applied in gypsum concrete. Others integrate low-mass underlay - wood panels with sunken niches for flexible tubing.

Every reconstruction or new-construction plan is better fit by one application or another, so look into your hydronic floor heating alternatives fully. Do your research!