In our prior videos, we showed you how to build a Schluter shower system. In that same
master bathroom, we installed Ditra Heat on top of the wood subfloor to heat the tile
bathroom floor and to also prevent the tile from cracking. So in this Part 1 video, we’re
going to show you how to install the Ditra Heat mat.
With our Schluter shower, we’re going to go ahead and put a Ditra Heat system in as
well. This is a very small bathroom. So we have 5 ft x 7 ft here of area. So we ended
up just ordering this stuff online. This comes in a box. These are just smaller sheets that
can be shipped rather than being in a roll. They’re basically 32 x 39 inch sheets. Kind
of makes it a little bit easier because they’re all nice and flat and straight. So you just
piece them together. To make them 100% waterproof, you will have to put a band in between each
seem. Let’s go ahead and position these in and cut around, and then we’ll thinset
them in place. The nice thing about Ditra Heat mats is they
stay flat, and they’re easily moveable. Plus, you can cut them with just a utility
knife. For example here, we’re cutting a hole for our toilet flange, and we left about
a ¼” gap between that and the mat. The same principle applies for mats and drywall.
We have a ¼” expansion and contraction joint.
The thing you want to make sure with this Ditra too is that you want to leave an expansion.
You don’t want this butting straight up against the drywall. So try to leave a ¼”
space. I think my drywall is kind of bellowing out a little bit, so I’m just going to scribe
cut this. But try to keep a gap in between the walls.
The great thing about Ditra Heat mat is it makes it so quick and easy to plan the layout
of your bathroom floor, and you can cut around obstructions like doorways and use scrap pieces.
Okay, to set the Ditra Heat mat, I actually got an official Schluter Ditra Heat trowel.
It’s basically just a ¼” x ¼” notch trowel. So that’s really all you need to
adhere this. You don’t have to actually buy a specific trowel for it. It just has
to be ¼” x ¼”. So just like any tile installation, you want
to wipe down the subsurface with a damp sponge. Just make sure you get everything out of the
way. Dampening the wood subfloor helps the thinset
also retain its moisture. Scratch that into the surface.
For this installation, we used Schluter’s ALL-SET. You can also use any modified thinset,
but we already had ALL-SET mixed up for our Schluter shower installation. So here we’re
just scratching the first coat in with the flat side, then we’re using directional
troweling to make sure all the trowel ridges face the same direction because that way when
you set the Ditra Heat mat or roll over top of the directional troweling. That will compress
the ridges and ensure that the mat will sit flat.
So in this case, we’re just setting the mat. We’re keeping our ¼” expansion and
contraction joint between it and the drywall and our Schluter shower curb. Now, we’re
using the flat side of the trowel to compress this mat into the thinset. You want to make
sure that that mat is completely compressed, and the trowel ridges are completely flat.
So the most important thing with the mat is just lining up these dots and making sure
that they’re all in a line because you’re going to be running the wires through here
and you don’t want to be jogging it too much. Like I said, cut out some of this so
that you have at least ¼” of expansion and contraction when you put it against the
wall. Again, the nice thing with Ditra Heat is you
just use a utility knife to cut it to size. And now what we’re doing is applying more
thinset underneath that mat to make sure it’s completely embedded in our mortar, and we’re
checking for coverage. That’s actually not very good coverage there.
So you could see, that’s not very good coverage. So I think I have my thinset sitting out a
little too long. I’m just going to re-whip this up. I’m not going to add any water.
I’m just going to re-spin it because that will give it a little bit more life out of
it. The ALL-SET stiffened up a little bit on us
because we actually used it to install the last part of our Schluter shower system.
That ALL-SET, you can re-mix it, and it gets back to a nice, fluid state. I have let this
sit for over half an hour, so it kind of stiffened up on me. Just by re-mixing it, it’s going
to give me some more lifetime out of it. So I’m just going to go ahead and re-trowel
this and re-set that piece. That’s why it’s kind of important to just double-check your
coverage because if this does get a little thick, then it doesn’t want to adhere to
that fleece very well. ALL-SET has specific mixing instructions for
Ditra Heat and Ditra installation, so it’s always best to follow those instructions.
Here we’re just setting this last piece and embedding it properly.
So now look at that. Now, that’s a lot better. That’s what you want to see. So if you saw
a whole bunch of air is on there like you did before, definitely take it back up and
re-set it so that you can make sure that this is going to be bonded well.
By the way, we’ll put a list of all the supplies that we used in this project down
in the description here on YouTube. We’re dampening the floor again with our
sponge. And it’s important to do this because, as we said earlier, this will retain the moisture
inside your thinset. So it actually helps the thinset perform much better. And in this
case, we’re applying our directional troweling so that when we do add the Ditra Heat mat
over top of that, it will compress properly. So as you can see here, we’re just piecing
everything together per our dry layout of our Ditra Heat. And when you do that, it makes
the installation so much easier and faster. I want you to walk on this a little bit, too.
It’s going to embed itself a little bit nicer.
This is going to be our fourth and final piece here over top of our wood subfloor. I should
note that you can also use Ditra Heat over top of a concrete subfloor and actually have
Ditra Heat Duo, which has an additional fleece on the bottom to retain heat and to reduce
sound. So you can choose Ditra Heat or Ditra Heat Duo for a project like this.
The next step is to install the Ditra Heat wires inside the Ditra Heat mat, and we’ll
show you how to do that in our Part 2 video. Now, the cool thing is all the tutorials that
show you how to tile the Schluter shower system and the bathroom floor in this master bathroom
are now available in the bathroomrepairtutor library. You can click here to check that
out. It’s awesome because if you want to build a durable shower and bathroom, we have
all the tutorials that’ll show you how to do that.
Thanks for watching this video. We really enjoy sharing our tips with you, and we hope
you have a great day. Take care!