Radiant floors
Has anyone installed radiant floors for heating an entire home? Do they actually save $ on your energy bill and work well? Can you install and still preserve your existing wood floors? Any recommendations?
Has anyone installed radiant floors for heating an entire home? Do they actually save $ on your energy bill and work well? Can you install and still preserve your existing wood floors? Any recommendations?
You’re right about that.
It generally takes less energy to heat our attached homes than any free standing structure.
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.
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.
The fact is you can only get about 15 BTUs per square foot out of a radiant heating system under the best of conditions.
Sometimes, supplemental heat is required. Especially when there are large cold surfaces (windows, skylights, etc.) to contend with.
As for drying: there is always a change in relative humidity when air changes temperature. That change is drastic when using a typical forced air system, which is why humidifiers are added to any quality installation of that type.
Water-based heating systems work much more gradually, with radiators, and create a more favorable atmosphere without having to add moisture to the air.
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.
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.
“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?
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.
Thanks for all the great feedback everyone and particularly the Easyfloor recommendation. Did you work with a contractor to install or did Easyfloor do it? Who advised you on the best types of wood to use with radiant heating for your flooring?