[Badgerdawg]

Kid's are finally gone and I am renovating the house going room too room. It is time to do the Living Room 17W by 26 feet long. Has carpet and we want to do porcelain tile with in floor heat(220 volt). I am thinking of running speaker cable on the sub floor with the heating wires, and then you thinset over the wires and let that dry and then you thinset again and lay the tile. Does anyone think this would be a problem? I would run the speaker wires along the walls and not over the heating wires. Going with 12 guage speaker wire.


Thanks, Brad

 

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

So long as you keep the speaker wires well away from the heating wires you shouldn't have a problem, unless you crank the thermostat up so that the floor tiles hit 200 degrees or so.

 

[Garidy]

Kid's are finally gone and I am renovating the house going room too room. It is time to do the Living Room 17W by 26 feet long. Has carpet and we want to do porcelain tile with in floor heat(220 volt). I am thinking of running speaker cable on the sub floor with the heating wires, and then you thinset over the wires and let that dry and then you thinset again and lay the tile. Does anyone think this would be a problem? I would run the speaker wires along the walls and not over the heating wires. Going with 12 guage speaker wire.


Thanks, Brad

Caution Required!

I would check your local electrical code. To my knowledge, NEC states that the wire must be a minimum of 12" at any point from traditional 120VAC supply lines ((running in parallel) (the distance is greater for 220 VAC)), and that the wire must be at least UL CLII Rated (I recommend that you install a UL CLII CMP with a sufficient AWG listing). If you cannot keep the wiring at least 24"'s apart, I recommend that you take another route.

If the lines from these two circuits run parallel for a significant distance and the space between them is under 24"'s, IMO it is likely that noise will ingress your speaker line. You will also be outside of the NEC...

 

[Gandu]

I had the entire downstairs of my house tiled a couple of years ago with 18x18 tiles, laid on the diagonal. Looks great, easier to keep clean. After the tile was installed, I just ran the speaker wires around the room in the little gap between the tile and the wall, install new baseboards with a thick base, it's simple and clean. No reason to mess with thinset or electricity.

 

[Bigen27]

As someone that has laid tile if ur not running a 16 or 18 gauge wire it might not work unless u use a thick layer of thinset and even then u run the risk of breaking tile because of the speaker wire being to big.

 

[DonH50]

At the very least I would run conduit and pull the wires through that to make them easier to replace if something happens in the future.

 

[zgeneral]

What he said. I don't think you'd want them permanently fixed in there. Is running it under the tile your only option? What are you running? You can run them through baseboards easily. Also, you can put them through walls. The problem with the tile if you don't do the above is the the wire isn't coming out if it doesn't work anymore.