I have heard of it. I did a thread a while back asking if anyone had done it but no one had. I initially thought about it but walked away from the idea. Most people think the heated counter, especially when cooking and working with foods on the table, is "gross, unsanitary, etc". Stone counters feel cool in the winter yeah but is it really needed to warm up the stone? The majority of people say no.

Soapstone is not as cold as granite. It will warm a stick of butter in no time. just an alternative if the "coldness" of granite is a deterrent.

This concept has been around for a while. I dont like it at all. I love the coolness of stone for countertops.

I think it depends on how cold you keep your house, your climate and whether your stone countertop is a place where you would regularly be leaning on, sitting at, or eating from.

Stone (of all kinds) is a heat sink so it will feel cold to the touch when it is colder than your hands/arms or plates. This is grand in a hot climate, or for handling things like pie dough or for candy making.

OTOH, if you live in a very cold climate in house that is regularly cooler than say 68-72F for many hours of the day, the stone will cool off to the lower temp. That will make (depending on your sensitivity to it) it feel too cold for comfort if you were to sit at it for a long time.

Stone has a very slow thermal cycle (some types more than others) so in order to heat the stone to a comfortable temp in a reasonable time, you would need to heat it 24/7 during the cool season. Most heating set-ups for counters appear to be some sort of electric resistance mats (or wires) mounted underneath, and combined with the need for continuous use during cool weather, it might get pricey to heat a large thick stone. It wouldn't need to be heated to body temp, but even to raise it 5-10 degrees might take enough electricity to make a difference in your bill. There has also been some discussion here about whether these mats or tapes would last as long as the kitchen reno, perhaps failing early and creating a need for an expensive fix down the road. I believe there have been people who have done this, but I can't remember who. Try googling for additional threads, beyond what you can find searching on-site.

My own choice (northern NY, in a cooler than typical old house) is to limit the amount of stone countertops in my kitchen for this reason. I plan to have enough to do the job for baking prep, water resistance around prep sink and as hot landing sites, but will have wood (or metal) elsewhere. I'm not planning to have any eating sites in my kitchen, but if I was, it would definitely not be at a stone surface, of any kind, for exactly the reason you mention.

I would have no sanitary issues with heating the stone, however. It's not like it's really going to be anything warmer than merely not chilly to the touch when heated. In all but the coldest of houses, it's already warm enough to be into the danger zone (45F+) for food spoilage so the few extra degrees wouldn't change that risk much.

The currently-popular ideal of large swathes of stone is something that works very well in warm to hot climates; intuitively it feels better there than in very cold ones, I think. I doubt that it has much true historical precedent in northern kitchens, even in large houses, so it's very much a current style/trend, even in so-called traditional designs. It was commonly used in pantries, still rooms, sculleries, etc., precisely for its cooling properties, but I think tile, wooden counters, or metal ones were more common until linoleum and formica came along.

To my eyes the fully-stoned kitchen looks very California/AZ/NV or Deep South or even Mediterranean, even if installed in a New England-y setting, complete with "Shaker" doors. To me, it's a stylistic non sequiteur, even though I know it's very popular right now. It would also make me nuts to use electricity to heat a counter-top in the winter. That would compound the depressing amount of energy used to claw the rock out of some Asian or South American mountain, and then ship it here. I couldn't stand to think of the added carbon-cost of heating it forever more.

HTH,

L.

If you are in a gardening zone that has a small number, and if you don't turn the heat up a lot, then stone countertops feel cold most of the time. This can be unpleasant when the rest of the house needs a bit of heat too. People who don't meet the climate or house criteria have a hard time agreeing that stone can feel colder than a merely pleasant cool feeling.

If the countertop is near windows it is colder than if it's near interior walls. People generally have a hard time understanding this. Even after one explains heat transfer, heat radiation, heat sinks and heat sources, they don't get it. Worse yet, they act offended that you explained something to them. Go figure.

People also don't understand that heat is heat is heat. When you add a small amount of heat in one segment of a building that needs heat, it increases comfort and does *not* constitute waste. If the heat you add in one segment of your building is considered a large amount, it reduces the heat load by a corresponding amount from your other heat sources. Duh. Sounds simple but people keep posting things to show they don't get it. So, adding a heat source to your stone (any stone) is a good thing never a bad thing, and a strong statement can be made that it costs nothing to run if you consider that the heat produced by your other heat sources will be lessened by the exact same amount, i.e. if your house temperature remains the same.

A small quantity of heat energy is ok, because your goal is not to melt butter nor to keep hot food hot. Many of the people who posted on the couple threads in the last year or two were thinking of a large quantity of heat and therefore the discussion was not productive of a consensus. They posted a lot about the bad sensation of a hot countertop. Holy cow.

Then, add this factor to the general ignorance: a crowd fear and concern about the fact that something electrical is "added" and nobody seems to know what to advise about mechanical protection of the heating cables. After all, it isn't their field in the first place. The discussion gets bogged down pretty fast, what with the uninformed and the ignorant all writing eww yuk and fear in most of the posts.

I've written about underfloor heat in hundreds of posts.

Hope this helps.

Here is a link that might be useful: in this post i state a number of things always true about heat

We are doing it for our island. Following the concept from Fine Homebuilding magazine. Go to thier web site and search and you will find a short article and photos.

In the winter I do not want to sit at and have my arms on cold granite.

Our island will have a thermostat so it will be warm when we wake up. Also will be able to shut it off when needed.

Your cat will love it.

I set down butter, eggs and other perishables on my granite counters all the time. I would not heat my counters for this reason. Furthermore, even in my cold climate, I have never once felt that my counters were cold--I simply don't lean on them at all. However, I do not use my counters to eat at; is that what you are talking about? Heating counters where you eat?

It's the only thing I didn't do that I wish I would have done. Lots of people pressing me to get heated floors (which I didn't care about) but no one suggested heated counters. This was almost seven years ago and I've seen people talking more about it since then.

We don't have stone on all of our counters but we do have it on the island and it's painfully cold in the winter. I live in MN and we have a setback thermostat that goes down to 60 all night and all day while we're at work. The granite counter only seems to warm up on Sunday after the heat's been up during the day over the weekend. Otherwise it is literally painfully cold if you lean on it without some kind of thick sleeves.

Aside from that you never want to set your dinner plate or coffee cup directly on it because your food and drink goes cold in about a minute.

Gibby, I had exactly the same experience with granite up here in Maine. We turn our thermostat down even lower than 60 at night, and it took the counters hours to warm up even a little, then it was bedtime again. I had nothing but granite for landing places - got so sick of having to reheat coffee.

If one were concerned about leaning up against cold stone in winter you could probably use wood instead of stone for the bar portion of the counter.

That's crazy. How many of you walk on yur countertops???

in warm or temperate climates it is a positive experience to be near the general coolness of stone or tile.

in a colder climate or house, it is the opposite, generally.
And it can be so, to the point of discomfort.

sochi is in a house in cold climate.
But, her counters are not radiating cold.

One thing people don't understand is that a truly cold countertop _steals_ heat from you, even when you are not "leaning" on it.

Given a countertop of sufficient coldness, and a house of sufficient coldness too, everyone will feel it as uncomfortable.

Instead of turning the whole house heat up, way up, one can apply heat to the one item that radiates cold, and turn it into a radiator, a heat source, radiating mild warmth.

i wish the moderators would delete the comment
"That's crazy. How many of you walk on yur countertops???"
.

We are trying to have a serious discussion here.

How hard would it be to add heat below the part of our peninsula nearest the bar area? There are drawers under there, but the outlet is also right near by. Did we need to build in an extra level of something?

You would need to ask an electrician if the outlet you have near can handle the load of the heat source you are planning. Heating devices can use large loads.

That said, the comment that heat is heat is heat above... True. But, generating that heat isn't the same from appliance to appliance to appliance/device. The heat generated is the same, but some sources of heat are more efficient than others. So, saying you are going to just heat your stone and the energy used will be proportional to what you would have used to create that heat from a different source is Incorrect.

waterdamage, according to the Fine Homebuilding article, you build radiant-heat mats into a mortared layer beneath the stone, as you would a tiled floor. But surely there are clever ways to retrofit if space allows? You'd definitely want the input of a qualified electrician.

Davidro, we've had many a discussion on this topic and people who live in temperate climes just don't understand it (the same way I just don't understand ever wanting central AC). The rudeness is unnecessary, but not to worry.

Does the presence of a large cold mass actually "suck heat away" or just appear to? I have no concept of the thermal dynamics of a closed structure. My granite kitchen always did seem really cold, the same way a tiled bathroom floor makes the whole bath seem freezing in wintertime. The only time I was really comfortable in there during the winter was when I was baking things for hours at a time.

Akchicago, it's not about heating it up to radiate warmth, it's about just bringing the stuff up to normal room temperature so it doesn't ice your coffee instantly every morning. No fear about eggs and milk, etc.

I also hasten to say that like Lirio, this is why I simply wouldn't get granite at all; there are too many other countertop material choices out there to justify the bother and expense of heating stone. But for those who love granite and live in cold houses/climes, I don't think it's immoral or sybaritic to want to make it liveable. It's just really expensive (aren't heating mats fairly inefficient?) and possible not the most reasonable choice.

Ironically, my current METAL counters (copper is an excellent thermal conductor) seem really warm in comparison to that stone. Gah. I loathed that granite. :-)

Davidro & Circuspeanut - although we (normally) have cold winters here, I suspect that my home is warmer than most homes in more temperate locations. I know this is true in comparison to the UK - although the outdoor temperature is warmer in the UK in January than in most parts of Canada (generally speaking, not always), I've never been colder in my life than at times in the UK. The colder the climate, the better the furnace and the warmer the house I think.

I keep my house pretty warm in winter. I can't stand the cold and I'm enjoying the very warm fall we've been having (my clematis are blooming for goodness sake! It's almost December!)But despite my great antipathy for the cold, I also have a hard time imagining heating stone counters. My walnut "eating" counter off my peninsula abuts my quartzite counters, so you can have both stone and wood (or another warmer material).

Here is a new twist. Something as puny as a strip of LED lights can add warmth to the stone at that point where the light strip is attached. This can work wonders, where the stone is cold, and uncomfortably cold. It can take the edge off.

I wrote Warmth in the above paragraph. Warmth is "heat", to be precise about the terms.

Warmth is not "hot" heat so the term "warmth" might make more sense to those who post about the danger of things getting too hot, or too warm, or whatever is "too much".

The operating cost is so minimal that it is irrelevant. The cost of electricity may be higher than another energy source but it is a small amount of energy being discussed here. Your home computer uses more energy than the amount that may be at stake here. Readers who don't get it will then post to claim that this amount of energy is so tiny that it makes no difference...

Perhaps some readers would like to read that the energy / warmth in question here is a small amount, that would take the edge off the cold. "Take the edge off" might be more palatable than "heating the countertop"... And this saga continues. Die Saga geht weiter but honestly doesn't seem to get any better. People keep posting they wouldn't want it, wouldn't like it, would want to see how much it costs, etc.

Stone (of all kinds) is a heat sink said liriodendron. To which, she added "it will feel cold". This is true at all times. A heat sink is a cold_radiator, an antiheat radiator, of radiator of antiheat, a radiator of Cold. It sends cold to you through space in exactly as strong a fashion as a heat radiator sends heat to you through space. The presence of a large cold mass does indeed "suck heat away" through space.

In some houses, a granite kitchen will always seem really cold.

Also, a tiled bathroom floor makes the whole bath seem freezing in wintertime, in some houses. If the bathroom floor is near ANything uninsulated, the cold of that un-insulated something can move into the tiles. Cold can move through objects just as heat can; this is conduction. Heat conduction, or cold conduction. Two ways to say the same thing.

sochi seems to have lucked into a well insulated house. If the exterior wall had a lot of air leaks inside it (invisible leaks under the exterior cladding), then that wall (and its counter) would feel colder, enough to make a difference that you could feel.

thermal energy is a term that reduces the ever present psychological barrier that many people fall prey to, when they read or say "heat".

One could also use another concept, far subtler than anything ever raised in this forum: it shall imply a vector field, because thermal energy is always moving towards sinks, permanently moving, never static. One could draw a batch of arrows on every photo, showing where the thermal energy is going to and where originating from. A thermal transfer "field". Ask any mathematician.

Curious discussion.

I'm wrestling with the decision about countertop material right now. And may have a friend of a dear friend fabricate a concrete countertop dyed to my chosen color (to those who may recall/care: I know I said no to concrete, but may be changing my mind).

I'm in the Mid-Atlantic. No sub-zero days, but it does get cold. Though in an interior row home with the heat off the temp has yet to go below 60 in my house despite a few 35 degree nights. I think I've been sucking heat from my neighbors.

The peninsula will be for eating. And especially for drinking coffee - hot coffee is a priority. Think concrete will be too cool? I like to keep the inside temp low - love lots of blankets at night.

Have lived with heated concrete floors before and absolutely love the kind of warmth they provide. I didn't ever feel the heat on my feet, per se. So I imagine a "heated" countertop wouldn't, if properly done, feel hot. But the house always felt cozy and pleasant -- and not a dry heat either. If I were to build my own house, I'd definitely go for radiant heat. And when/if I ever need to redo my bathroom, there will be radiant heat installed!

I should add that the home where I lived with radiant heat concrete *did* have cracking. I have no idea whether this is because of the radiant heat, pouring large area of concrete, or poor workmanship. I suspect the latter as I used to have concrete countertops (different home) and there was no cracking but those were done by a pro and the concrete floors home were done by a DIYer.

I see all kinds of misconceptions about stone counter tops. First of all, stone (granite, marble, etc) is a good heat conductor, but it is not "cold". In a kitchen, it is at room temperature. It may feel cool to the touch, because room temperature is cooler than body temperature. It is good for candy making because it conducts the heat away from a boiling sugar solution and gets it to room temperature fast. It is not a good surface for pastry making because it will conduct heat into a cool lump of dough to bring it up to room temperature.

Heating your counter tops will conduct heat into your room, which won't have to be added via your furnace system. But warmer than room temp working surfaces may be a problem with the preparation of a lot of foods.

Thanks, circuspeanut and kirkhall. I'll have to look under my counter sometime.

I should add that the home where I lived with radiant heat concrete *did* have cracking. I have no idea whether this is because of the radiant heat, pouring large area of concrete, or poor workmanship.

You are supposed to wait, I think it is 28 days, for the concrete to cure before applying heat. Do you know if the proper waiting period was observed in this case?

I see all kinds of misconceptions about stone counter tops. First of all, stone (granite, marble, etc) is a good heat conductor, but it is not "cold". In a kitchen, it is at room temperature. It may feel cool to the touch, because room temperature is cooler than body temperature.

Cooksnews, all true, but you haven't read this thread and are under misconceptions about how people in cold climates actually heat their homes during the winter.

Say the ambient temperature has been hovering around 0°F (-18°C ) for a week or so. At night, the thermostat is set to 55° for 8 or 9 hours, which means that the kitchen, with typically fewer heat registers or radiators and usually situated on an outside house wall, is probably a number of degrees shy of that. You need a lot of warm air to warm a thermal mass like granite, and you're not going to get that during the hour or so your heat goes back up to 68°for the morning breakfast. So you've got a hunk of rock that's not only around 50°, but it's happily sucking the warmth from the less-dense air as well.

If you don't think a 50° hunk of rock in your kitchen in the morning isn't "cold", then you must have never traveled north of the Mason-Dixon line. When discussing heating granite, folks are not talking about heating the stuff up ABOVE room temperature -- they're talking about trying to bring the stuff UP to room temperature.

Those who say their granite is warm are likely folks who don't work outside the home and thus don't turn the thermo down during the day, don't step the thermostat back very much at night, or spend a lot more on heating than the average bear, thus keeping a much more even temperature inside the house.

At room temperature, any stone is a heat sink.
At normal room temperature.

Both cooksnsews and circuspeanut mentioned "room temperature"
Even At Room Temperature, it still is a source of Cold.

It sucks warmth away from your body.
Your body temperature is at a higher temperature than room temperature.
Heat transfer flows from your body to everything else.
Heat transfer flows from your body to heat sinks in particular.
Because a heat sink is a grabbing sucking entity.
ANY difference in temperature = a transfer of energy to the colder place.
A transfer of thermal energy.

Stone of any kind has a high number called "specific heat".
That number is key.
Add to it this factor: the conductivity.
It pulls heat fast, it conducts it, it grabs it.
If you had a thick slab of copper steel or aluminum, it too would suck heat.
A heat sink.
But stone takes more heat energy than metal... !

A "sink for thermal energy" sends cold to you through space in exactly as strong a fashion as a heat radiator sends heat to you through space. The presence of a large Cooler mass sucks heat from you, through space.

Tile too. A tiled bathroom floor makes the whole room seem cold.
This is reality, when your climate is cold.
Worse is when it's cold and damp.
Worse yet is cold, damp and with air leaks in the building envelope.
Every house is different.

My goal, which I shall achieve in time, is to enable those who want heat to be applied to their coldest items have this discussion in a positive supportive environment that educates and elaborates on the details. I think we are getting there.

A heat sink is a cold_radiator, an antiheat radiator, of radiator of antiheat, a radiator of Cold. It works at room temperature to make you feel cooler or cold.

That is why tile and stone are used a lot in hot climates.

I really wish I had done it, particularly on the part where we sit to eat. The granite can feel like ice cubes on your bare forearms. My contractor suggested it. A lot of folks here in San Francisco do it. The temps are generally in the 50-60's here pretty much year round. I don't tend to run the furnace much. Insulation is pretty much non existent in many houses here, including mine (except for the new addition), so it just uses a lot of gas for little benefit. We wear lots of sweaters and slippers.

lol Marcy -- I went to grad school in the Bay Area and it was frustrating to have all the Eastern relatives assume I was kicking it up in a tropical paradise, when in reality I was wearing socks in July ... ;-)

In colder climates, the buildings feel comfortable because it's airtight and well insulated. And heated.

San Francisco = cold = because they didn't build it for a cold climate. Then, people spend more on heating.

I dialogued with a woman from San Francisco about this, in the bathroom forum. Many interesting points were raised and dealt with, fast.

Here is a link that might be useful: warming jillalameda's bathroom in California

Given my very low tolerance for being cold, I've often wondered how I'd manage in a home in the UK, or northern California, where it can get pretty chilly, but not cold enough for the full insulation and furnances like we have in Canada and the northern US. I'd be miserable. I think it is central heating or the tropics for me.

(actually I'd probably adjust, probably. Or I'd cry alot). I've lived in Europe, but all my homes were well insulated and heated, thankfully.

I lived in the UK! Silk long underwear, and lots of wool.

I plan on adding heat to the soapstone on the side of the island where we sit. I want the kids to sit and do projects and homework there while I work away in the kitchen. As others have said, morning breakfast on a very cold hunk of rock in the deep freeze of Jan/Feb is not very appealing. I would rather heat the island for an hour before we get up and be able to turn the heat down on the whole first floor for the night. And to echo what has already been said, this is not an attempt to heat the counter as much as a desire to have it pleasant to touch. The rest of the counters - all 30' of them are not heated. Prepping and cooking on the colder counters is not an issue, it is sitting at the island for extended periods that we want to make more comfortable.

Dennison17,

Just wondered what you decided.

Debra

Have you considered stone for food prep areas, with wood at seating/elbow areas? There was a recent post with several good photos of different options. We plan to have granite counters with a raised counter in walnut or butcher block across the eat-at peninsula.

We also live in Maine and keep the heat between 62 and 67... hope all the dire predictions of counters taking all day to warm up don't come true. But... DH chose granite, so I'll just blame him:-)

Off topic perhaps but I thought I'd add...same concept applies to passive solar installations. There needs to be thermal mass--often rock, concrete, or water barrels. They inhale warmth during sunny part of day and exhale warmth later. The swing from hot to cool is very dramatic.

We have a "solar porch" along one wall of our house. The floor is poured gypcrete (concrete product used in hotels, apartments, etc for dense floor) with dark-colored tile above that. During sunny winter days we open curtains and let sun heat be absorbed by the floor. The floor is a heat sink. It warms up. By mid-afternoon it might be downright barefootworthy in February. Before sundown we need to close the curtains. Late afternoon and into the evening, this floor slowly cools, releasing the heat into the porch and adjacent space which is at that time cooler than the floor. Once the air temp is cool enough, the thermostat kicks in the primary heating system. This might be well into the evening, depending on the weather outside. All night long, the temp of the porch floor continues to descend to the temp of the room air--say 62 degrees--and in morning the porch floor is definitely not barefootworthy. I don't like being in that room during winter if the floor has not been warmed by the passive solar gain.

On cloudy winter days I go elsewhere and the curtains are left closed. The cold floor fights me for first dibs at the warmth being sent into it through the heat registers and the floor wins. Or I get a blanket for my lap and my warm socks and a rug for my feet.

We have a wood stove in the same general part of the house. If that gets to be too hot for comfort, we open doors to the porch so the mass in porch floor grabs that heat and the adjacent room cools down.

We have ductwork throughout the house so we can run the furnace fan to spread out the heat. We also have two ceiling fans which help spread out the porch heat. It's never ideal, but we've had the passive solar porch since we built it with incentives from fed gov't under Carter and it's made the house less expensive to heat and the porch allowed us to have wonderful views from windows that would not have been permitted by code without the thermal curtain.
___

I'd be happier if the heating of a rock countertop were also doing something more useful: warming the room as well, cooking a crockpot-like meal, or the like. Otherwise it's another stupid American waste of hydrocarbons.

Heating countertops is best rewritten as " warming countertops. " Nobody wants their counter to be hot or even to be warm enough to melt butter.

In the case of warmed floors it has been demonstrated that occupants feel comfortable at a lower overall temperature. So, energy consumed may be less instead of more.

Sun, Nov 27, 2011 in this thread I wrote about the fact that heat added in one part of a room is not wasted heat. It reduces the heat required from other sources, in that particular room. It improves comfort because the "feeling cold" feeling is reduced.

GREAT idea and thread. My question is -- can one retrofit an island with this? I'm interested in warming an island seating area with no desire to raise the island height. Countertop material is quartz. TIA.

In a past thread about this same subject someone talked about how the small fridge they had put in their island had the unplanned benefit of warming the granite on the island.

I found that to be an interesting little tidbit.

Davidrol, the key issue is the Conductivity of a given material, isn't it? All the materials in the room will have achieved ambient room temperature if they have been in the room long enough, and that temperature always will be lower than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit unless you really crank your furnace beyond belief. But those materials with high conductivity will feel colder, because they are faster conductors of heat away from warmer objects (your elbows and morning cup of joe) into the colder object (your granite counter). What is the relative conductivity of soapstone compared to granite? I don't know the answer to this.
Lynn

Lynn farmgirlinky yes it is as you wrote it. Stone of any kind has the same effect because the difference between stones is not significant. Conductivity is a big factor in the "feeling cold" feeling. But it is not the only factor. Combine it with thermal mass.