My Background in Floor Heating

For over 20 years, I answered the phone saying, “Hello, this is Victor, how can I help you?”. I no longer answer the phone for a large corporation, but would be happy to help you resolve whatever issues you might be experiencing with your radiant heating or snow melting system.

My radiant heating experience beyond troubleshooting and technical support includes various aspects of manufacturing the systems. I helped with Quality Control, as well as maintenance of the manufacturing equipment, new product development, and prototype evaluations. I have installed indoor and outdoor systems as well as evaluating and documenting Warranty claims. I helped establish some of the preferred methods employed to repair electric radiant heating systems, and I even helped edit installation manuals and end user manuals and videos. I know more than just a thing or two about these systems, and having this kind of a knowledge base is often very helpful in determining what went wrong and what might be required to get a new, or 20 year old system, working properly.

In 2005 I invented and built the first ProTracer (TM) damage locator system for Watts Heatway or it may have been called Watts Radiant, Inc. by that time. Watts Radiant is a company within the Watts Water Technologies platform, known as WTS on the New York Stock Exchange. Watts’ present electric product lines include SunTouch mats and cables, WarmWire, Premier Underfloor, SlabHeat and ProMelt, as well as some earlier product lines such as HeatWeave and Bask brands. The ProTracers were given or sold to some of their largest distributors and regional Sales Reps, and they were available as a rental tool package offered to the public from 2006 through 2020 but they don’t have as many as when I worked there. The PT crates are able to isolate the problem with a very high percentage of most manufacturers’ electric heating cables, even when covered by ceramic tile or stone tile as long as the tile and mortar bed isn’t too thick. They tend to work best on a cable that draws 10 Amps or less, but some heating cables normally pull well above that level.

I built and maintained 40 ProTracers for use in the US and Canada on behalf of Watts. I took most of the phone calls when somebody had one on site and needed help using it, often when using it on one of Watts competitors’ products, with a very high rate of success in pinpointing the problem for literally thousands of rental customers. The ProTracers were used successfully on most of the electric radiant heating products available in North America including Schluter DITRA-HEAT, Pentair Nuheat, WarmlyYours, INFLOOR, HeatWave, HeatTech, ThermoSoft, WarmUp and probably several others.

The Watts Radiant ProTracers’ biggest limitation in my opinion was always the maximum power output limits of the two primary pieces of equipment within, the Current Box range is 0-10 Amps @ 0-140VAC. My crate of equipment is considerably more robust. My box goes from 0-20 Amps @ 0-280V. My hipot tester is more powerful too. The extra power can be especially helpful when the floor has a thick mortar bed with thick tile and when the system covers a large area, even when the layout pattern is a complete mystery. The “thermally reactive sheets” found in Watts’s ProTracer crate are 1’ x 1’ and display heat differentials by color change. They are best suited to thinner tile and mortar beds and only work from about 64 to 88 ℉. My thermal camera can see much smaller changes in temperature over a much larger area and save a lot of time.

The floor heating systems that are essentially laminated sheets of plastic with a foil or carbon based heating grid pattern are rarely worth fixing if anything really goes wrong in the floor. I evaluated many of these products from several manufacturers and took calls related to them for many years, often installed under floating laminate floors. In some cases they were able to get the panel or most of a set of panels working again so if you want to discuss yours, I would be happy to.