You Find Out in July

The five floor heating mistakes that are invisible in a quote, permanent in a slab – and how to avoid every one.

Several times a month, Phil Pacak takes a call about a floor heating system another company put in: a house two winters old, a lukewarm floor, a power bill the caller reads out slowly – and an installer who is right when he says nothing is wrong with the installation. What went wrong never appeared on the quote, and by July it is under a hundred millimetres of concrete. This guide names the five mistakes behind those calls, shows the physics of each one in plain English, and tells you exactly how to make sure none of them ends up under your floor. Enter your email and read it straight away.

• The suspended-slab trap – the house where the warmest room was the garage, and the physics that put the heat there.
• The hidden heat pump – how tucking the engine out of sight quietly costs up to half its efficiency.
• Controls in the wrong place – the thermostat mistake that over- and under-heats the same house.
• The heat leaks nobody drew – the 1992 building that lost $32,503 a year through pipe that looked perfect, and where a heated slab leaks the same way.
• "All hydronic is the same" – two quotes on a kitchen table, word-for-word alike, and the engineering line item printed on neither.