Electrical under-floor heating in one room

Does anybody have experience with electrical under floor heating?

It's for a guest toilet/bathroom aprox 4 meters square which I will be building in the near future to connect. to our existing floor heating (water) system would be possible but a lot of work. I was hoping the electro version could be an easy alternative (just for the one room)

are they any good are they expensive to run? I can get the complete package for aprox 199 euros, is this good?

My whole house if fitted with underfloor electric heating and it works really well. The major drawback with it that you really need to have it on on all the time in the winter, using a thermostat of course. It takes too long to warm up if you turn it off every night, although this may not be such a problem with such a small room. It's not cheap to run but it is completely maintenance free.

Radiant heating is lovely...

Electric version's operating cost will more over the long run as opposed to water heating...

If you do go electric, get one that you can set with a timer, turn off during the week-day and on at nights.-..

Allers Did you install it yourself? Is it as easy as they say?

No it was fitted in the house when I bought it.

For ours the electrician fitted a duct in the wall for the switch & thermostat, then the cables (one power, one thermostat) simply run down to the floor. The heating element is a simple resistance cable running in a long S in a mat about 1m wide and however long (8m for us). The mat can be cut to fit around awkward shapes in the room, although obviously don't cut the wire. If the mat will only cover part of the floor and you intend to tile the floor then you need to be a bit more careful so the thermal expansion of the floor doesn't cause the tiles to crack - in this case cover the heating element over with an extra metal mat to disperse the heat a bit more. The whole thing should be laid flat on the entire surface to be heated, glued down and then set in some sort of screed/plaster and then levelling layer. It can then be tiled over - but remember to get everything that needs drilling into the floor set before you lay the heating mat!

The costs are easy to work out, I think ours is 160W/sqm, and at the moment it's on the whole time but the thermostat turns it on every couple of days. It seems to take 4+ hours to become noticably warm so not useful for instant heating - ultimately we'll have ours turn on at something like 2am and off again at 6am to give us a nice warm floor for the morning.

expalin a bit more about the metal mat thats something new the Baumarkt said nothing about this but its an interesting point

my new apartment has the floor heating, and I don't like it at all. It takes ages to warm up - so you need either to leave it on during the day and get a temperature shock when you come back, or to turn it off and freeze for hours until it gets warm again. There are some thermostats though, so I'm experimenting with them for last few days, but still haven't found the "right" position.
@Allershausen - do you maybe have some tip for me?

btw, the only place where it seems to be working really nicely is actually the bathroom - providing you don't turn it off. If you splash the water around, it dries the floor

Sorry slateberry I didn't see your question - I'm not wholly certain how much of a problem it is and if it's only a problem in some circumstances but our kitchen is about 2m wide, with only the middle 1m having heating, the rest being under cupboards and stuff. The fitter said he thought he should put a sheet of steel fencing down (a grid of 3mm thick steel cables) over the floor heating area that covered a lot of the rest of the floor that didn't have the heating to spread the heat a bit more so there wasn't such a big temperature difference between the heated and non-heated area. This may be because we used large tiles, or something else, but the guy was paid a fixed price for the job so it wasn't in his interest to spend more than necessary which leads me to believe that this was genuinely a good thing to do. So far no tiles have cracked...

I have mine set to about 18°C in the living room permanently in the winter, never turn it off. The bedrooms are kept colder as is the bathroom. This seems to work out a comfortable temperature as it's constant.