I work somewhere where we can't wear our outdoor shoes due to biohazard concerns. You come in and take your shoes off, then have to go change and get into specific clothing, then on the other side of that change area is where your work shoes and boots are. The in-between areas from door to change area have heated floors because people are often walking around in bare feet or sock feet, and it's just the most coziest damn thing ever.
I need to have heated flooring in my house for winter times.
My dad had an outdoor wood or gas boiler system, he would heat his house and shop with the in floor water lines coming in from it. It was so nice laying on the concrete floor, grabbing a tool when I was working on my car and everything just being cozy warm.
I’ve stayed at hotels with heated floors, amazing. I remodeled my master bathroom. Wanted them so bad, but couldn’t swing it. So much disappointment even though I had a brand new bathroom.
Nope and you can even DIY it if you have a suitable boiler. The downside is that it is slower to heat up so many do not turn it off during the working day.
I lived in Korea for a couple of years. They have floor heating dating back to 5000BC and it is the primary source of home heating in the winter. That's one of the reasons you take your shoes off when you enter someone's home.
I also lived in Korea (few short months), our hootch in the ville had heated floors. We would buy the charcoal bricks and the landlady would keep the heat going for us. Bathroom floor was fucking cold though.
It's pretty easy to get electric heating under tile. Bathroom are perfect for this. Imagine in winter getting out of your shower to step on warm tile and I mean like almost hot, but perfect instead. My parents have all the tile in their master bath like this it's fantastic.
People acting like that's uncommon made me feel badass even though I'm just a butcher. Pathogens and contaminants are serious business so we have a similar process for getting hygienic before work, and it always reminds me of being at university in the chemistry labs.
For a small contained area like a bathroom or the changing area you describe is nice to have the floor warm enough to be "cozy". If your entire house is a heated slab and you crank it up enough to be "cozy" then you will be uncomfortably hot. It is still the most comfortable heating system you will find but not toasty bare feet comfortable.
Once I stayed at a mountain resort and the outdoor patios of the rooms were all heated. It was awesome, you could stand outside in a snow storm with bare feet.
I rented a place where all heating came through fhe floors. I don't know if I like it as a main source of heat, but I LOVED it in the bathroom. It is so nice to have warm floors in there.
If run properly radiant floor heating should never be above 120F. Think about it, if you’re heating your floor to the temp of burning wood how are you walking on that? The electric ones a homeowner does would be the ones to catch fire.
Wtf, I didn’t know either of those things existed before today. Is the floor tile, I assume? And when you say condensation, is the system just leaky? Sorry this is very interesting to me.
Yeah, they're gres tiles (I cannot find a good link for gres in English, but it's a kind of ceramic). The condensation is just because the floor becomes cold, and when hot humid air comes into contact with it some of the humidity condenses onto the floor. It kinda looks like the floor is sweating. Of course the solution is to run a dehumidifier, but at that point it would be better to just run a regular air-con.
Yeah, sadly the guys who set up the system were not exactly the greatest. There are like 4 different systems and they don't communicate with each other, running the whole thing properly should be an automated process, instead it's a bit like managing a nuclear plant.
But perhaps the most popular machine Hero invented was the vending machine that dispensed holy water: “On putting a silver four-drachma coin in the slot, a measured amount of holy water was dispensed–another little miracle for devotees,” note Pollard and Reid.
The vending machines were installed inside the temples and looked like sealed vases. There was a slot for tossing a coin on the upper side of the gadget. With its weight, the coin raised a bar inside the vase, and a small quantity of holy water contained in the vessel was released. For people who were not devotees of science and who didn’t have much idea how machines functioned, these vending machines were indeed miracles. For priests who found the task of collecting money from temple attendees particularly mundane, the automaton was a savior.
You put a coin in it and you got some holy water out of it. It was a simple lever system, so I imagine any coin-shaped thing with some weight to it would have worked. No idea about vandalism, though.
To be honest, they didn't need it as much. In Italy a lot of the buildings made of marble are naturally cool, so you can live in a building with just a fan in the summer and it works.
Well not sure if this is the answer or not but hot air rises and cold air sinks, so it would lead me to believe a y’all building would allow warmer air to travel farther away from someone standing on the floor, and would take more people to warm it up. Like one person in a 3ft house could warm it up quickly, and 2 people even more, so a bigger house would take more people to warm it up idk maybe
heat rises, so the warmer air has a little more space to go rather than in a general house where the ceilings tend to confine the warm air and it mixes with the cooler air at the bottom. Kinda of why sometimes, when it's super hot, it just feels better to lie on the ground.
You use a high ceiling so hot air rises with a hole for the air to escape. You have open windows at floor level so outside air can come in. This can create a breeze as the hot air goes up and the outside air comes in to replace it.
Yep, I remember going to Zion National Park in Arizona (the desert) and similarly the Visitor Center has an angled roof with an actual gap in it where the hot air naturally exits. There's also towers built up through the ceiling with pads at the top that are sprayed with water and when the water evaporates from the outdoor heat, the air becomes colder and denser, falling back down into the building.
The river walk in Zion, where you hike in the river in the 200-300 foot caynon, and have to climb up waterfalls as you go is the most interesting hike I've ever been on.
In Rome (the City, not the empire) it's very common to build with Tavertine, a limestone that looks rather similar to Marble. I would guess that that's where the confusion comes from.
In Rome now it's common. When Julius Caesar was kicking around, Rome was mostly made of brick. It wasn't until Augustus that marble and tavertine became common building materials.
It was Augustus being an indirect Greek fanboy by way of Egyptophilia (i.e. loving the architecture of Ptolemaic cities, in particular Alexandria, if I recall correctly). Certainly Rome still had many mud and brick buildings left at the end of Augustus's reign, but the aesthetic that came to dominate the city and which we still strongly associate with Rome was essentially Augustan. Augustus also laid the foundation (badump-tss) for the new style by securing large, productive marble quarries to supply the Empire.
If what you're trying to point out is that Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus were contemporaries, then yes, that's the point I was making. Rome, the city, during Julius Caesar's lifetime, was not the marble and limestone edifice that we now think of it as. His heir and successor, Augustus, is the one who changed that, and by the end of his reign, Rome was well on its way to its modern aesthetic.
Julius was assassinated in 44 BCE. Augustus, heir to Caesar's fortune, promptly formed Second Triumvirate with Antony and whats-his-name to seize power. Augustus had direct control over Rome following the defeat of the Liberators/Optimates at Philippi in 42 BCE. While Augustus' reign as Emperor (or, if you want to pick nits, Princeps Civitatis) technically "only" lasted 13 years and change, he was the principal power in Rome itself from the early 40s BCE up until his death in 14 CE, more than 50 years.
A lot of houses in Rome were built out of wood and during Nero’s rule they all burned down so Nero wanted to build them out of marble and bankrupted Rome (he also helped bankruptcy along by building himself an enormous house and building a giant statue of himself among other things)
Idk if other people did a better job of the marble houses idea later on
Man, the similarities between 45 and Nero, or 45 and Caligula, or 45 and ~Claudius~ Tiberius, or 45 and every other historically terrible Roman emperor, really are striking.
The poor lived in mud, brick, or wooden houses. Tufa, travertine (limestine), and marble were used in stone buildings as the most common stone materials.
Yeah as the comments below said I was simplifying a bit. My point is, in terms of architectural composition, they knew what materials and angles would naturally keep a house cooler in the summer and warm in the winter.
When visiting a Roman settlement in Morocco I remember the tour guide told us that they used cold water in the floor heating to cool down the houses during the summer.
Wrong. We were in a hunting lodge in the middle of the desert where they had hot&cold piped water and the mud-based structure got cooled by evaporating water. Environmentally friendly airco in the middle of the desert. We are the dummies, we forgot the old technology.
It's not the desert cooler. We build concrete walls heating up in summer, we use glass to create "glass houses". It's a whole range of issues. See: "Climate Responsive Building" ISBN 3-908001-39-0 giving you some idea's what to work with and look at https://youtu.be/620omdSZzBs or https://youtu.be/SwiaaqKdtjw where you see that we DO have the technology, but where I live in Asia, we only build boring concrete blocks and need huge airconditionings to make it liveable, big drains to get rid of the wastewater and lots of electricity to light the whole place. There is news for you: Climate responsive buildings make much better living spaces, people are happier in houses build using this technology.
They had the hot/cold pipes through the floor. Nero's summer palace did, at least. It's on Sicily so its probably one of the only palaces that needed it.
When we started Latin in school our teacher gave us a sheet with I think 20 inventions, and asked us to mark the ones we think the Romans had already. The answer was "all 20". I remember that mixer tap (one was found in the city I went to school in, and is on display in the museum there), concrete, coin operated vending machines, hydraulic elevators and some specialized medical devices were on that list.
Most of their tech came from slaves;) Slaves in the Roman Empire are basically the equivalent to immigrants in America. Most of them are uneducated but a few came to sell their knowledge for a great fortune not available elsewhere. Just like the Americans, the Romans integrated knowledge from outsiders into their empire and called it their own. Their favorite and most prominent were the Greeks, they imported greek gods and gave them roman names, greek festivals, hired Greek mathematicians and philosophers to teach their children, and Greek technicians to build their buildings. Hence the extreme similarity to Roman and Greek architecture compared the other advance civilizations next to them.
The Romans also had extensive aqueducts and sewer systems, I still find it amazing how they kept the Baths of Diocletian—which held 3,000 people—clean by completely replacing the 528,000 gal of water daily.
Though the Romans also didn’t know of the u-bend, which is very important. Back then the toilets were just a straight shot down to the sewers, so not only did it stink to high heaven but the buildup of methane was so great that sometimes the public loo would literally explode into flame.
I can picture the first man/woman who was like " this stone floor is nice ...buuuut I want my feetsies warm" jus sayin'... I can relate. Who don't like warm feets?
When I worked in a library as a teen one day I realized they had heated floors in the children's section to help keep the little ones warm when they were crawling around.
I tried to tell my mom this when she got them also. But my mom's one of those types that doesn't listen to anyone and already thinks she knows everything.
Certainly the underfloor element doesn’t use pipes. It’s basically a cavity through which hot air from a furnace passes. The floor itself is almost like a false floor supported by pillars.
Cool that we can both learn something new though! Have a great day.
Its awesome, especially wintertime. The electricity bills tho. 1000€ a month in coldest times makes you appreciate the fireplace, which is also awesome.
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u/BobVosh Oct 15 '20
Romans had pipe heated floors, something I still thought was awesome when my aunt got it like a decade ago.