The one number that actually compares: $27.61 vs $14.97 per sq ft
The HeatTrak HR20-60 walkway mat lists at $229.99 for 8.33 sq ft of coverage — $27.61/sq ft. The WarmlyYours WHMA-240-0215 embedded cable lists at $449 for 30 sq ft — $14.97/sq ft. On the shelf price alone, the embedded cable is the cheaper heat.
That comparison is honest only if the asterisk comes with it: the WarmlyYours figure is the cable mat by itself. It excludes the concrete or asphalt pour it gets embedded in, the thermostat control, and the licensed electrician who runs a dedicated 240 V circuit to it. WarmlyYours’ own published range for a finished, installed embedded system is $8–$25 per sq ft including materials and labor — so a real embedded job can land anywhere from roughly half the mat’s price to nearly the mat’s price, per square foot, before you’ve counted the mat cost inside that range at all. The HeatTrak number, by contrast, is close to the whole transaction: buy the mat, buy the required HR-P Power Unit, plug it in.
HeatTrak won’t say how many watts; WarmlyYours will
WarmlyYours publishes 1,500 W total and 50 W/sq ft for the WHMA-240-0215, on its own product page — a real number you can build an operating-cost estimate on. HeatTrak publishes 2.5 A at 120 V for the HR20-60 and, as of our last check of its site and FAQ pages, no wattage anywhere.
We won’t multiply that out and call it a spec. Volts times amps is apparent power (VA), not the real power a wattmeter would read, and presenting the product would misstate exactly the number this niche is supposed to get right. The bound is 120 V × 2.5 A = 300 VA, with no manufacturer-stated tolerance on this model to carry alongside it. Until HeatTrak publishes a wattage or a UL/ETL cord tag settles it, the honest answer for the mat is: unpublished. That gap is itself a finding — it means a HeatTrak owner cannot compute a per-storm electricity cost from the spec sheet the way a WarmlyYours buyer can.
120 V you plug in vs 240 V an electrician wires
This is a circuit conversation, not a taste preference. The HR20-60 runs on 120 V and requires HeatTrak’s HR-P Power Unit, which has a built-in 6 mA-trip GFCI and supports up to 13 A of mats per unit — so the circuit math is bounded by the Power Unit, not the wall outlet.
The WHMA-240-0215 runs on 240 V, draws a published 6.25 A, and needs a dedicated circuit, a snow-melt control, and ground-fault protection per NEC 426 — none of which a homeowner installs themselves. WarmlyYours’ own circuit note is explicit that this is licensed-electrician work. We’re not going to walk through 240 V hardwiring here; if you’re weighing the embedded option, that conversation happens with a licensed electrician, not a spec page.
Two years of warranty vs ten
HeatTrak’s residential warranty on the HR20-60 is 2 years. WarmlyYours’ warranty on the WHMA-240-0215 is 10 years. That’s a five-fold difference, and it’s a real one — but it’s a liability term for a product embedded in concrete for its service life, not a promise about how long either product actually lasts. Neither manufacturer publishes a service-life or replacement-interval figure, so we can’t tell you the mat needs replacing in year 3 or the cable needs replacing in year 11 — nobody publishes that number for either category.
Melt rate is marketing on one side, missing on the other
HeatTrak claims 2 in/hr for the HR20-60. That’s a manufacturer marketing figure, not a lab measurement, and it’s worth saying plainly: this is effectively the melt rate every mat on the market claims. WarmlyYours doesn’t publish a melt rate for this record at all — it publishes 5,118 BTU/h for the mat instead, a different unit measuring a different thing (heat delivered, not inches per hour cleared). You can’t line the two numbers up against each other, and we’re not going to pretend you can.
Are you pouring concrete anyway? That’s the real decider
Everything above is close to a wash — cheaper heat on one side, a real wattage and a longer warranty on the other, a plug versus an electrician’s visit. The question that actually breaks the tie is whether a pour is already happening.
If you’re already repaving a driveway or pouring a new walkway, the embedded cable’s $14.97/sq ft mat cost gets absorbed into labor you were paying for anyway, and the $8–$25/sq ft all-in figure from WarmlyYours is the number to plan against — not the mat price alone.
If you are not paving or repaving — if the driveway or walkway already exists and you just want less shoveling this winter — the mat’s higher $27.61/sq ft is very often the cheaper real-world answer, because there’s no excavation, no concrete crew, and no electrician’s dedicated-circuit invoice sitting underneath it. The $27.61/sq ft is close to the entire cost of ownership; the $14.97/sq ft is a fraction of it.
Running both scenarios against a specific storm frequency and a specific electricity rate is exactly what our break-even tool does — it takes the capital side (a real mat combination at published MSRP, or the WarmlyYours installed range you supply) against a plow-service baseline you enter yourself, since no seasonal plow-contract price is currently citable at source.
Who should not buy either of these off this page alone
Anyone in a high-snowfall zone weighing a full-driveway embedded system on cost per square foot alone should treat the $14.97/sq ft mat price as the smallest number in the job, not the answer — the installed range is $8–$25/sq ft and the boiler-versus-electric fuel question isn’t covered here at all. Anyone comparing a single walkway mat against a whole-driveway cable system is comparing different jobs; the HR20-60 covers 8.33 sq ft, not a two-car driveway.
Two genuine cons on each side
For the HeatTrak mat: the wattage is unpublished, so you cannot build a real per-storm electricity estimate from the spec sheet the way you can with WarmlyYours’ 1,500 W figure. And the 2-year warranty is meaningfully shorter than the embedded cable’s 10-year term, for a product that sits outdoors through freeze-thaw cycles all season.
For the WarmlyYours cable: the $14.97/sq ft mat price is not the job cost — real installation, per the manufacturer’s own published range, runs $8–$25/sq ft once concrete, control and electrician are added. And once it’s embedded, it’s embedded; there’s no unrolling it in April and reusing it somewhere else, unlike a mat.
Side by side
| Spec | HeatTrak HR20-60 | WarmlyYours WHMA-240-0215 |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | 8.33 sq ft | 30 sq ft |
| Amp draw | 2.5 A | 6.25 A |
| Rated power | not published | 1500 W |
| Watts per sq ft | not published | 50 W/sq ft |
| Melt rate | 2 in/hr | not published |
| Weight | not published | 8 lb |
| Warranty | 2 yr | 10 yr |
| Listed price | $229.99 | $449.00 |
| Cost per sq ft heated | $27.61 | $14.97 |
No winner is marked for coverage, amp draw, rated power, watts per sq ft, melt rate, weight, listed price, because every one of those scales with how big the product is — "lowest amps" would only ever mean "smallest mat". The comparison that survives a size difference is cost per square foot heated, and it is derived by us from the listed price and the coverage, not published by anyone.
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