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Technical drawings and dimensioned layouts spread across a desk

Part 6 · Deciding

12 min read

18 questions to ask before anyone touches your floor

Put these to every installer you speak to, ours included, and to traditional masons too. For each one we have written down what it protects you from, what a straight answer sounds like, and what should make you slow down. This is the most useful page on the site.

Read on

How to use this

You are not being difficult. You are being a client.

Nobody expects a homeowner to know what watts per square foot means until they are spending a month's income on a floor. A good installer will be pleased you asked — it makes their job easier and it means the person paying them understands what they are buying.

A fair warning

Several of these are uncomfortable to be asked as an installer. That is deliberate. The reaction you get is itself information: someone who welcomes the question and answers it specifically is telling you something, and so is someone who becomes vague or irritated.

Take the ones about wattage, insulation thickness and sanctioned load into the first meeting. The rest can wait until you have a quote in front of you.

Set 1 of 4

4 questions

The system itself

Before anything else, establish what is actually being sold to you and at what capacity. Vague answers here tend to stay vague later.

Set 2 of 4

4 questions

Power, outages and running cost

The questions specific to living here. An installer who has genuinely worked through a Kashmiri winter will have thought about all four of these.

Set 3 of 4

5 questions

Installation and the floor itself

Questions about what happens to your house. Ask them before the first hammer, not after.

Set 4 of 4

5 questions

Warranty, control and afterwards

The part of the conversation that gets skipped when everyone is keen to start. It is the part that matters in year four.

Still weighing it up?

Talk it through with someone who has installed these in the Valley

Put every one of these to us before you put them to anybody else. If our answers are worse than the next installer's, you will have found that out cheaply — which is the point of the page.