Bathroom floor heat on a simple timer switch

J

JoeNorm

Senior Member
Location
WA
I have a customer who wants to put under-tile floor heat mat on as simple a timer switch as possible. Like a countdown switch if possible.

I think usually the controls have built in GFCI so I would have to do that in the panel, which would be fine. I expressed that this is not a great idea because of the lag time involved with the heat but he thinks that is OK.

Any issues with this? Just to be clear, I don't like the idea at all. But sometimes people want what they want.
 
JoeNorm said:
Maybe, this is why I am posing the question here. It may be that most mats require the use of their own controllers for warranty and safety purposes
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I posed my response as a question because I suspect that is the case, but I don’t know for certain. Have you looked at the installation instructions for clues?
 
Customer is looking at cost of the controller, but you haven't told them how much the GFCI breaker plus the timer will cost and it may end up being almost the same.
 
kwired said:
Customer is looking at cost of the controller, but you haven't told them how much the GFCI breaker plus the timer will cost and it may end up being almost the same.
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It's not a cost issue at all. It's a simplicity of use case. Plus they figure they'll never use it anyway as this is basically a PassivHaus.

Anyway, the more I have thought about it the more I think we will push the customer into the standard route
 
Put in the standard heat mat stat/controller with a simple timer in front of it. Then you can easily remove the timer when it doesnt work.

The controller my mat had, came with an integral programmable time clock. We turned it on and off twice a day.
 
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Timer is kind of pointless IMO. It takes quite a bit of time before the surface of the floor will even begin to feel warm with most these systems and is not like say a forced air heater where you have somewhat instant heat effects - like may be common to see with common bathroom heat/vent units.

Typical in floor heat controllers can have programmable timers and are able to have the floor warm at specific times, but they need warm up time and not really an on demand kind of heating application.
 
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