How to Keep Hardwood Floors Warm in the Winter

6 years ago

last modified: 6 years ago

Solutions to how to keep hardwood floors warm in the winter include:

Place rugs in problem spots
Add insulating weather strips to doors and windows
Ceiling fans can help to reduce cold spots by circulating air
Redirect air flow by replacing air vent covers with multidirectional grills
Replace your curtains with triple layered interlined heavy blackout curtains
Limit access to the room from entrances that open directly to the home exterior

Let’s start from the beginning. We must consider the construction of the home (solid vs suspended flooring) and the type of insulation being used (e.g. foam board, fibreglass). Next we must consider the hardwood itself (e.g. Oak, Maple, Mahogany) and how to eliminate draughts and damp.

Solid vs Suspended Flooring

Solid floors consist of a concrete base topped with insulation and fibreboard. Suspended flooring places parallel rows of brick supports between the concrete base and the fibreboard layer. The difference between solid and suspended flooring is best illustrated as a small insulative gap vs a large insulative gap respectively. This significantly affects heat retention.

While a correctly insulated solid floor will help a room to heat up relatively quickly, the wood floor will rapidly cool once the heat source is removed (as compared to the time taken for a hardwood floor to cool atop a correctly insulated suspended floor). Let’s take a look at how this affects the overall lifetime efficiency of solid flooring compared to suspended flooring:

Solid flooring: 8-10 year cost effective period on heating costs
Suspended flooring: 3-5 year cost effective period on heating costs

A note on insulation: Phenolic foam is often used to insulate solid floor constructions because of its relative insulation efficiency – the thin synthetic material is used in conjunction with wood fibreboard to achieve a high performance while minimising the additional floor height. This material is also commonly used with suspended flooring, where wool or fibreglass is used between the joists.

Hardwood vs Softwood – Choosing a Wood Floor

Hardwoods have a high comparative density compared to softwoods. This higher thermal mass means that hardwood floors absorb, retain, and release heat over a longer period. Hardwood floors with a high thermal mass include Oak, Maple, and Walnut. Where possible, opt for solid wood floors (five eighths to three quarters of an inch thick) over engineered floors (a wood veneer glued to plywood). This will increase the cost effective longevity of the floor in terms of the number of times the floor can be sanded.

How to Keep Hardwood Floors Warm

Once we have considered the construction of the house (solid floor vs suspended floor), and we have selected the correct underlay, fibreboard, and hardwood floor to fit with both the house construction and your style preference, we move on to isolating and removing potential causes of draughts and damp (see list at top of page for pro tips). Remember, hardwood floors will retain heat for much longer than a softwood or carpeted floor. Smart use of sunlight could also help to keep hardwood floors warm in winter. Open your curtains during daylight hours to allow the wood to absorb heat from the sun. Be sure to close the curtains once the peak temperature of the day has passed.

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Hello! We have done two things which relate to some of the issues you describe. However, I should point out that we don't have a cellar; we have ground around 30cm below our ground floor joists. We have wooden floorboards rather than concrete - but I would imagine concrete would be easier to insulate, perhaps from below, in the ceiling of the cellar? Anyway, this is what we did: We insulated under our floor borads on the ground floor. (Note that not every single one has to be lifted, you lift a few every foot or so). Celotex was inserted between the joists. There is a risk the insulation will fall out onto the ground below, so they cut it slightly too big and then hammer it in. It's wedged in very tight and we have had none fall out two years later. As I wrote in my post above as well, we added angled vent covers outside to reduce the draft coming in under the floorboards. We were very concerned about air cirulation when doing all of this, but we have come to the conclusion that the air circulation is already so large under our ground floor, that the celotex and vent covers aren't really an issue. It's not like we have sealed everything shut, there are still plenty of tiny gaps everywhere. We haven't had any issues with mould or anything like that. The other thing we have done more recently is to balance our radiators. We had the problem that our front room was extremely cold relative to the rest of the house (although we had high spec/high BTU radiators in all rooms). We thought this may have been due to low power on the radiators, but in fact after doing a big rebalancing exercise, it's now the warmest room in the house. We're quite surprised how much of a difference rebalancing makes. There are plenty of guides online which we followed; essentially, what you do is you first check how open each radiator is (check the lockshield valve, not the TSV!). We wrote this down on a piece of paper for each radiator in the house (e.g. "fully open", "3/4 open", etc). We then put the heating on from cold and ran around the house checking which radiator fires up first/last. Made a note of this on paper. We then realised that in our case, although the front room radiator was fully open (which would suggest it should get the hot water first), in fact so were many of the radiators that are closer to the boiler. As a result, the hot water was going to those closer ones first (it takes the easiest route). The solution was to close the lockshield valves on the radiators closer to the boiler (not completely, you do it 1/4 of a turn at a time and check the effect). After a few runs we were able to get to a point where the hot water was filling up the front room radiators first. Now it's great. I hope this can help you! Good luck!
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How to Keep Hardwood Floors Warm in the Winter

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