Radiant Heating Floor

I was lucky to partially grow up with those.

When I arrived into my family from my foster family, the house I entered was a ruin. My parents were young but the house was raggedy. Nothing was completed at all. I bathed in a bin for quite a while.

One day, looking at my dad laying down electric cables on the ground where he was supposed to pour concrete for the future house’s floor, I wondered, “the fuck is this?” or something like that.

He explained to me that those cables would heat the floor and be controlled by a “computer” (technically yes, but more like a calculator) that would know what the temperature is outside and warm our feet accordingly. It was 1985-86. That was kind of science-fiction-y and I thought my dad was doing too much.

I’ve pretty much never met anyone who had/has radiant heating floors at home. That shit is brilliant. I just have this memory of myself going down the stairs –wood- to go to the bathroom, dreading the moment I would have to put my feet on the cold tiles because I had forgotten my slippers…Not. The tiles were warm. Meanwhile, it was snowing outside, sometimes around Christmas. I remember thinking, “oh now I totally get it; this is great”.

Sometimes it created mayhem because the electric load would be too heavy and we had to choose between warming up the floor or having clean clothes but hey, shit happens.

If there’s one device I miss from France it’s that one, which I can’t ship to Cali. The floors are cold here too and instead of getting blown hot air in the face, I’d rather have some mild heat coming from the bottom. Much more comfortable and efficient.

So simple yet, so wonderful and underrated. Tragic.