The managing director of a floor heating business in its 26th year argues the industry is not losing these sales. It is never making the offer, on a decision that expires the day the floor covering goes down.
There is one number at the centre of Rick Florence’s business, and he is careful to say it is an estimate rather than a measurement.
He puts it at one per cent. That, in his experience, is the share of Australian clients who ever see a floor heating quote before their floors go down.
“There is nothing out there officially that says one per cent,” he told The Good Builder Podcast. “But this is just what we feel.”
The other half of that number is what makes it worth sitting with. Florence, managing director and owner of Coldbuster Floor Heating, says almost everyone who experiences floor heating likes it.
“Just about everyone loves floor heating,” he said. “But we find maybe one per cent of people think of it and ask for a quote to consider before it is too late and their floors are down.”
Coldbuster has been operating in the Australian market for more than 25 years. Florence bought it around a decade ago from an architect couple, at a point when it had one and a half staff. He was not looking to start something. He was looking for something already proven with room left in it.
“I was looking for a business where there was enormous untapped potential,” he said. “Which is rare to find, and floor heating fit that mode ten years ago.”
Why floor heating is a now or never decision
Most inclusions can be added later. Solar can go on at any point. Smart home gear can be retrofitted. Floor heating cannot.
Once the floor covering is down, the only route back in is up through it, and Florence says that almost never happens.
“Very few clients are going to lift a floor just to put in floor heating and then put it back. That is a big expense,” he said. He estimates about one in a thousand Coldbuster clients has done it.
The result is a specific complaint the business fields constantly.
“We hear it every day, over and over. I did my floors. I forgot about floor heating. Nobody told me. It is too late, my floors are down.”
RICK FLORENCE, COLDBUSTER FLOOR HEATING
Florence’s framing is that when that call comes, the loss is shared. The architect, the designer, the builder and the electrician each had a moment where they could have raised it, and none of them did.
The four beliefs that end the conversation early
Florence’s position is that clients are not rejecting floor heating. Most are never given anything to reject.
He argues sequencing matters more than the pitch. Ask a client whether they want floor heating and you are asking them to price it in their head, and the number in their head is wrong.
“If you ask them first, you are quite likely going to get an automatic no thank you, because in their mind are these four misconceptions, or at least two or three,” he said. “They are saying no for the wrong reasons.”
The four, as he lists them.
It is a luxury item, so it must be expensive. Florence says this is a legacy of what the product cost decades ago rather than what it costs now.
It is electric, so it must cost a fortune to run. He points to programmable thermostats that learn the room, reach a set temperature at a set time and then cycle on and off to hold it, which he says cuts both heat up time and guesswork.
It is a bathroom product. He says plans arrive several times a day with instructions to quote the bathrooms only. Coldbuster quotes the whole property back, priced room by room, and he says four out of five clients accept the wider quote.
It heats the floor. In Australian conditions, Florence argues, warming the floor is the bonus rather than the function.
That last one is where his own understanding shifted. Florence grew up in Toronto, where the same product does a different job.
“In Canada, floor heating is more to heat a cold floor. It is not going to heat a room on its own in the middle of winter,” he said. “But in most Australian conditions it is the opposite. Floor heating is the best way to heat the room.”
His preferred sequence is to have the quote and the heat layout in hand before the subject is raised at all, so the first version of floor heating a client meets is a room by room price against a drawing of their own home, not an abstract idea with a luxury price tag attached.
“No floor should go down in Australia without the customer seeing a free quote for floor heating before it is too late,” he said.
The cost, and the claim attached to it
Florence puts most bathrooms under $1,000 and a whole typical house at $10,000 to $20,000.
His first argument on cost is a substitution one. If a client is spending money to heat that area regardless, floor heating is not additional spend.
“Do not think of floor heating as an additional cost for your project,” he said. “Think of it as an alternative cost.”
His second argument is considerably bolder, and he flags that himself.
“We boldly put forward that floor heating is the best investment anyone can make in their property in the entire building industry. It is a huge call.”
The reasoning runs on the gap between perception and price. Florence estimates that $10,000 to $20,000 spent across a house adds $50,000 to $100,000 or more at resale, because the property then presents as a luxury property.
That figure is his own, not a published valuation benchmark, and it reads as a commercial position rather than a market measurement. The narrower observation underneath it survives the caveat: the same perception that stops clients asking for a quote is what makes the finished home read as premium when it is listed.
Florence acknowledges the double edge. “That luxury image works for us and against us.”
The health and comfort claims
Alongside the money, Florence puts three arguments behind the product. Comfort, value and health.
The comfort case rests on distribution. Radiant heat rising from the whole floor rather than air pushed out from one or two points in a room. Nothing visible, nothing to hear or smell, no moving parts and no space taken up.
On health, he says radiant heat avoids recirculating dust and particles the way forced air systems do, and that drying rooms out reduces mould and mildew. He also mentions the absence of an electromagnetic field as something a portion of clients raise with him.
These are the company’s own positions rather than independently assessed findings, and no external testing is cited for them. What is not in dispute is that mould in new and near new homes is a live issue in the Australian market, particularly through the humid subtropics.
It sits inside a wider shift. Homes are increasingly being built for comfort and performance in ways that make the heating specification a design decision rather than an afterthought, and floor heating is one of the few elements in that conversation with a hard deadline attached to it.
Comfort as a handover problem
Host Aaron Ng put a different frame on it during the episode, drawn from conversations with volume builders about where customer experience actually gets won or lost.
The build stages, he argued, are where the friction lives. Contract, colour selection, slab, frame, lockup, handover. Every builder is measuring those, and there is always some pain in there no matter how well the job runs.
What clients talk about years later, he said, is how the home lives 12 to 24 months after the keys change hands. That is the window that produces word of mouth and referrals, and it is the window most builders have the least visibility over.
It is also, Ng noted, the argument for a point of difference that is felt rather than specified. He raised display homes as the obvious test case, on the basis that most display villages read as broadly interchangeable to a visitor walking through them.
Where it sits in the build program
The practical detail is where the episode earns its length for anyone running a program.
Quoting runs off plans plus the flooring type room by room. Florence says turnaround is usually 48 hours or less, with the option to move a job up the queue. Installation is best booked with around two weeks notice, though he says the company works around shorter runways regularly.
What Coldbuster needs before the crew arrives is narrow. Two conduits in the wall, set up by the site electrician, the room cleared and the floor swept.
“We go in, we put the cold tail of the floor heater through one conduit, we attach a monitor,” Florence said. “You turn the monitor on, the light is showing, there is no siren. That means it is working.”
The heater is laid to the plan, the floor sensor goes through the second conduit, photos are taken and the crew leaves. The flooring trade follows, ideally the next day. If no siren sounds while they work, nothing has been damaged. The site electrician later connects the sensor, the cold tail and the thermostat.
A small bathroom can run 30 minutes to an hour. A whole house is around a day, depending on how many people are on it.
“It does not interrupt anything before any of the trades before or after us,” Florence said. “It does not complicate anything.”
Coldbuster installs directly in Sydney and works through contracted electricians elsewhere, most of whom are also trade customers. It supplies product only as well, which matters because the rules differ by jurisdiction.
“In certain jurisdictions, anyone can install floor heating, like in New South Wales,” Florence said. “But in a lot of other states, you have to be an electrician.” That is his account rather than a verified regulatory position, and it would need confirming against the relevant state licensing regulator on any given job.
Why the company will not quote hydronic
Coldbuster declines hydronic work, and Florence says he is asked for it two or three times a week.
His objections are cost, machinery and moving parts, ongoing maintenance and the possibility of expensive future repairs. He also raises zoning. Electric floor heating is isolated room by room, much like light switches. Hydronic runs as a single system.
“With hydronic floor heating, typically you are heating in the slab,” he said. “So you have to heat the slab, then the floor, then the room.”
Because of that lag, he says hydronic tends to get switched on at the start of winter and off at the end, rather than run to a schedule.
On running cost, he says the historical advantage has gone. “Historically hydronic floor heating was cheaper to run, but that is long gone.”
This is a supplier assessing a competing technology, and it carries the obvious caveat. Florence’s own answer to that is to put the two side by side. When a hydronic quote comes in, he offers to quote electric alongside it. He says about half take him up on it, and about half of those change over.
Warranty length is the tell
One of the sharper practical points in the episode was about warranty terms, for a product that becomes physically inaccessible for the life of the floor.
Coldbuster warrants heaters for 25 years and thermostats for three. Florence is blunt about shorter terms.
“We have come across others that offer ten years for floor heating. This is a product that is permanently under the floor. Ten years is ridiculous.
RICK FLORENCE, COLDBUSTER FLOOR HEATING
He also flags the wording rather than just the number. “Make sure they are real warranties, not silly lifetime warranties with a thousand exclusions.”
How it works on multi residential
For developers, Florence sets out three positions.
The first is that the developer funds floor heating throughout every dwelling and prices the uplift into the sale. On his round numbers, 100 townhouses at $10,000 each is a million dollars of spend, which he argues returns considerably more at settlement.
The second is that the developer funds the bathrooms and lets Coldbuster quote the remaining rooms unit by unit, so purchasers can upgrade. That creates a second revenue line on stock already sold.
The third applies where there is no budget at all. Coldbuster quotes every room of every dwelling and the quote is handed to purchasers as an upgrade option after sale.
“Just imagine selling a development next to an identical development, one with floor heating, one without,” he said. Either the priced one sells higher, or it sells faster at the same price.
When the floor is already down
There is a second line of products for jobs where the window has closed. Heaters that sit beneath rugs. Foot warmers for a desk or a couch. Pendant and strip radiant heaters for indoors and outdoors.
There are also complementary items for live jobs, including heated towel rails and mirror demisters that stop bathroom mirrors fogging.
Florence is upfront that none of it is the business. “We are a floor heating company. That is where our bread and butter is.”
The electrification backdrop
Heating specification is moving underneath all of this, though not in the way it is often described on site. There is no national requirement for new homes to be all electric. Residential changes to the National Construction Code are paused until mid 2029, which leaves the NCC 2022 provisions as the residential benchmark for now.
The movement is at state level. Victoria has barred new dwellings, apartment developments and residential subdivisions requiring a planning permit from connecting to reticulated natural gas since 1 January 2024, and from 1 January 2027 the requirement extends to new homes that do not trigger a planning permit at all.
In those markets, electric floor heating stops being an upgrade conversation and becomes one of the heating options genuinely on the table.
What makes a good builder
The episode closes on the question every Good Builder guest gets, and Florence answered it without notice.
“Someone who cares about their clients, but you have to know your own numbers,” he said. “You have to be profitable on every project, so you can treat your clients better.”
He extended it past the balance sheet.
“To treat your clients properly, you have to treat yourself properly first. Make sure you are profitable, make sure you are taking time off and doing the right things and do not overwork as well. It is a whole life thing.”
Ng noted it was only the second time in more than 330 episodes that the answer had landed squarely on profitability. The first, by his recollection, came from Avid Property Group’s Peter Wood, who answered in three words. A profitable one. It is a theme that keeps surfacing in conversations about running a building business, and it tends to come loudest from operators who are not builders themselves.
The gap underneath the product
Strip the product out and there is a process point sitting under this episode.
Florence is not describing a business losing sales. He is describing an offer that is almost never made, on a decision that expires at a fixed point in every build, on a line item that is a rounding error against the contract value.
Whether floor heating suits a given job is a separate question, and the answer will often be no. His argument is narrower than that. The question is rarely asked while it can still be answered.
“The downside with all these products, including floor heating, is once you have experienced it, it has ruined you for life.”
RICK FLORENCE, COLDBUSTER FLOOR HEATING
Frequently asked questions
Not without lifting the floor. Electric floor heating sits directly beneath the floor covering, so once the covering is laid the only way to install it is to remove and relay the floor. Rick Florence of Coldbuster says roughly one in a thousand of the company’s clients has done that. For jobs where the window has closed, the alternatives are portable and surface products such as heaters that sit under rugs, foot warmers, and radiant pendant or strip heaters.
Florence puts most bathrooms under $1,000 and a whole typical house at $10,000 to $20,000 for floor heating throughout, with volume discounts on larger projects. Quotes are priced room by room, so a client can accept or decline each space individually. Running costs vary by tariff, climate zone, hours of use and floor type, and Coldbuster publishes a calculator that the company states should be treated as a guide only.
Florence says it does, on two grounds. Brisbane has fewer cold nights than Melbourne or Sydney but not none, and the company also sells into northern Queensland for drying rooms out and reducing mould and mildew rather than for warmth. He argues the resale positioning holds regardless of climate, though that valuation claim is his own estimate rather than a published benchmark.
Electric floor heating runs a cable beneath the floor surface with a thermostat per room or zone, similar to light switches. Hydronic circulates heated water, usually through the slab, as a single system with pumps and machinery. Florence, who declines hydronic work, cites cost, ongoing maintenance, potential future repairs, slower heat up through the slab and the loss of room by room zoning. That comparison comes from a supplier of the competing product and should be read as such.
It varies by jurisdiction. Florence says anyone can install floor heating in New South Wales, which is why Coldbuster installs directly in Sydney, while a number of other states require a licensed electrician. The company works through contracted electricians elsewhere and also supplies product only for builders using their own trades. Installation licensing should be confirmed against the relevant state electrical regulator before a job is scheduled.
Listen to the full episode
Rick Florence appears on The Good Builder Podcast. The full conversation covers the quoting workflow, the hydronic comparison and the multi residential models in more detail.
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