Radiant floors

A radiant floor goes under the floor, so salvaging the floor would be impossible.

You can probably salvage the floor boards, but they are going to need to remove the entire floor.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 11:09 AM

RE: 11:09 Unless one can install from underneath, which is the way that many, many radiant floors are installed.

That said, Radiant is difficult to do with wood floors because A) wood doesn't do a great job transferring and retaining heat and B) wood expands and contracts a great deal. Depending on your hardwood lay pattern, you might have a long term maintenance issue with the floor. None of the above should be a stopper to your plans, it just needs to be thought through with an HVAC engineer.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 11:29 AM

I wouldn't do this unless, I was gutting the entire space. And I def wouldn't put it under wood floors.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 12:10 PM

Radiators are the best source of heat in this climate, anyway.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 12:35 PM

We put in radiant floor heating throughout our house -- 1 floor with porcelain tile above it, and 2 floors with red oak strip flooring above it (except for bathrooms, which are tiled). It's been great and our heating bills are a bit lower than before, but it's hard to say if it's from this or from better insulation and window seals. It is a fabulous way to heat....heat is even, comfortable, clean, totally "invisible." Radiators somehow seem to create dirt and grime, IMO. Only drawback is that you have to use quarter-sawn wood for floors, which expands and contracts less and is somewhat more expensive than standard.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 12:59 PM

Does it really heat the whole house in Winter? And without having to turn it up so much your feet feel cooked on the floors? The idea of hot floors creeps me out somehow.

I love radiators. They do the job. The worst thing about them is not being able to put furniture where they are installed. But then you can't put furniture over a central-heat vent either. Or intake. The lack of those issues being the best thing about the radiant floors of course.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 1:19 PM

12:59 - I'm the first poster about radiators, not the second.

I'm very curious - do you have high ceilings? Do you have large rooms? Do you live in a 100-yr old house (built with no thought to insulation) or one of a more recent vintage? Brownstone, brick or frame?

Does it really heat the space well (without the floor being hot, as 1:19 mentions?) Do you usually walk around barefoot or with just socks on? I really want to know.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 1:31 PM

12:59 poster here. Radiant floor heating does heat the whole house, evenly and unnoticeably. Floors are never hot, just slightly, barely warm on bare feet. Hardly noticable. Honestly -- just comfy. And the whole concept is that the heat is evenly dispersed and of course rises evenly from all spots, not just near a vent or radiator, so of course all of the air feels equally comfy. Not having to work around radiators etc...is hardly the best thing about it...it's really just the even, comfortable heat. You walk into the house and it just feels "right." No drafts or cool spots.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 1:33 PM

Once again, there are ignorant comments on Brownstoner.

I have radiant heat over wood floors in NYC, and it works great! Radiators are drying and work too hard in one place and not enough in the other--gross.

My warm floors are not overbearing, make no noise and push no air around, are totally comfortable for walking around barefoot, and are definitely more efficient.

Caveats are many:

1. You need to use certain kinds of wood because wood does expand and contract. Thin planks are better than thick ones. Quartersawn is better than flat sawn. Dimensionally stable species are better. Talk to your flooring distributor about what kinds of wood are going to be good with radiant heat. I would NOT use my original wood floor, which is probably pine and not dimensionally stable. Engineered wood floors work great. This is what we did in our rental unit, where we needed something less expensive and stress-free.

2. You can install radiant heat from beneath, in the joists, but it's MUCH easier to put it on top of a subfloor. I used a system that I think is probably more efficient than the typical routed plywood route called Easyflor. It's basically a plastic grid that you put hardeeboard on top of. The hardiboard provides thermal mass (crucial for efficiency!) and the air around the plastic parts acts as an effective insulator of both sound and heat.

3. You wind up building up your subfloor 1.5" with this system, or the width of a 2x4.

4. I think one of the reasons this works for me is because I have neighbors on either side of me. If I had a north-facing room in a standalone house, for example, I would probably need more heating power.

But frankly, the idea that most people in NYC shouldn't be using radiant heat is absurd because of the density. We didn't even have heat for part of the winter--no heat at all--and it wasn't that bad. Even when it was 20 degrees outside it was still 57 degrees in the house, with no space heaters. That's not comfortable, but it isn't pipe-freezing temps either...

I would google Easyflor if you decide you want to rip up your existing floor (a must if you're going to go radiant, I'm afraid...). I enjoyed working with them and their system is great for DIY.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 1:37 PM

Sorry, I'm 1:37. I wrote that crack about ignorant comments when there were only a few disparaging comments on the topic. :)

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 1:39 PM

It's 12:59 here again. We live in a 100-year-old brick house which was recently totally rebuilt except for the exterior walls, so we have up to date, blown in foam insulation. Ceiling height on 'parlor' floor is high but the other floors have standard 9 foot or so high ceilings. One or two rooms are large, the rest are "regular' or small size. It really doesn;t make a difference if you understand how radiant heating works -- again, floors are never hot to the touch. Just barely warm at most. The large rooms have a large amount of floor space, obviously, from which the heat rises, so there is more heat coming into those rooms than into the small rooms (obviously again). They all seem to be evenly heated. If it gets cooler toward the ceiling is hard to tell, since none of us are 9 feet tall. I guess that's one of the implicit questions in the above post, if the heat dissipates as it rises. Can't really tell. Never felt warm by our calves and cool by our heads or anything. It just feels even and comfortable. Some of us walk around in bare feet and others in socks. I wear flip flops (has nothing to do with temp of the floor). No one has ever complained no matter what they are wearing -- or not -- on their tootsies. As a test, on this cool day when we don't have heat on (I think) I just took my flip flop off and felt the porcelain floor. It is slightly cooler than my skin. One last thing -- my favorite thing about this is that the house is warm even in the vestibule, as soon as you step into the house. When we had radiators it was cold by the front door and the heat felt much more uneven.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 1:41 PM

Thanks, 12:59, and 1:37. I had always heard that radiators are better in this climate, that radiant heat is better in more temperate ones. Guess that is wrong. May have something to do with the attached rowhouses keeping in the heat better, as 1:37 notes - but that's what we have here (mostly).

I'm wondering why more people don't install it, then, when they do gut or almost-gut renovations. Is it just a matter of cost? Is it terribly expensive to install?

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 2:05 PM

1:37 here.

It cost a lot. About 11K for all the materials, engineering by the florheat people and a very schmancy manifold. Another 1K to get a plumber to hook up manifold. Did all the labor laying PEX etc. myself.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 2:28 PM

Thanks for the info. I'm reading here, I realized, so I'm educated when I do buy a house and do that reno. (I'm realizing I really want to do my own reno next time, not buy someone else's, as I did when I bought my apartment. Then, as first-time buyer, hadn't the money or time to do my own.)

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 3:34 PM

The easyflor people designed it--we sent them a drawing of our house and they:

1. Engineered a layout and explained to us how to alter it if we needed to without losing efficiency
2. Gathered together a kit of materials
3. Built a manifold that attaches everything to the indirect water heater and boiler
4. Gave us a really thorough set of instructions for DIY install.
5. Were very available when we had questions

Installing it is pretty easy. The plastic pieces flop down and click together like legos and cut with a tin snipper. Then you follow the drawing they send back and put the PEX in. Each floor gets a mini-manifold somewhere. The whole thing gets filled with air and sits for 24 hours to determine NO LEAKS. Then the plumber hooks the whole thing up to the boiler or whatever and you fill it with water.

Hardeeboard gets screwed down to the plastic, and you mark it first with chalk so that you don't inadvertently send a a screw through your PEX tube.

Voilla!

Any contractor you trust should be able to do it if you don't want to. All you really need is a compressor and the understanding that there's water in the floor so careful with screws.

You can get tons of information about wood species and shapes for radiant heat on the web, and as someone else said, people everywhere else use Radiant all the time. So any distributor of wood flooring should be able to help you choose something appropriate.

My wood takes longer to heat up than my tile because wood is a better insulator than tile. But it works great once it's heated up.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 6:29 PM

"Once again, there are ignorant comments on Brownstoner."

Um, I thought I was merely asking a very logical question. And gee, someone else admitted they were wondering the same things.

Judgemental and superior much?

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 6:33 PM

Radiators aren't drying when they're hot water radiators. Hot water ones also don't make the banging clanging noises. We don't get hot and cold spots in the room with them. I think if anyone is getting that it's due to insulation or window issues.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 6:36 PM

Sensitive much?

It is ignorant to say that radiators work better than radiant heat in this part of the country when there are lots of people in this part of the country who do radiant successfully. This isn't Maine--it's actually quite temperate here.

It's also ignorant to say that they need to remove the entire floor, because they don't, and lastly, it is ignorant to claim that radiant is difficult to do with wood. People do it all the time. There are rules about it that you really should follow, but it's certainly not difficult.

I stand by what I wrote!

For that matter, hot water radiators are too drying. The hot water stays inside the pipes, just like the steam.

Posted by: guest at April 2, 2008 6:46 PM

I'M sensitive?

Don't think so, 6:46. You must have spent a lot on those floors to be so defensive and unpleasant about it.

Enjoy your radiant floors. And your radiant personality.

Thanks Master Plumber as always for the truth and your expertise, here. I have never experienced drying with our hot water radiators and I have always heard from every single plumber we work with that they are less drying. The skin on my hands cracks open and bleeds with forced air heat. So yeah, gee, I think I'd be the first one to know if our hot water radiators were drying the air in our home.

Posted by: guest at April 3, 2008 11:47 AM

While it may be that large windows and skylights require an additional form of heat, I found it most interesting to find out in answers to my questions above that your typical Brookyn attached house (which tend to have large windows, but with most of the exterior walls attached to the next house) can be heated well with radiant heat. I didn't know that.

And, while what Master Puvmber says may be true, it may not be as relevant if you own a brownstone-type attached house, rather than a stand-alone Victorian or a house in the burbs. The type of house one is talking about clearly matters.

Posted by: guest at April 3, 2008 1:15 PM