In Floor Radiant Heat

If you're considering a radiant floor heating system, you have a choice of going with an electric or a water system.  We choose to go with a water system.  One great advantage of a water system over an electric system is that you can use a variety of energy sources to heat the water: a gas water heater, electric boiler, wood boiler, heat pump, solar collector, or even geothermal energy. If in a few years your heating source, such as oil for a boiler, becomes too expensive, you can change over to solar or some other source. Another advantage is that the water retains heat a lot longer than electric wires.

Radiant heat is awesome.  Unlike forced-air heating, radiant floor heating doesn't just recirculate the dust and stale air through your house and it cuts down on heat loss through leakage.  A forced-air heating system uses the air from the rooms, heats it, and blows it back into the house. This make for a pressurized a house, pushing warm air out through cracks and openings.  Because a home heated with radiant heat isn't under pressure, the room air and the heat stay inside.

You also don’t need to worry about your warm air escaping when you open a door. You will still feel a draft but a room heated radiantly recovers quickly. This type of heat warms your body and other objects in the room rather than just the room's air. This means you can keep the thermostat turned much lower than forced air heat.

1.       We tied tubing to our rebar with zip ties before the slab was poured for our foundation.

2.       These tubes were hooked up to a control area that is outside the house.  This is for safety in case something happens and you have a leak, it will be outside the house.  Each length of tubing goes from one copper pipe, through the house, to another copper pipe outside.  You are not allowed to have any splices of the pipe at all in the house at all.

3.       The rest of the tubes were threaded through the knockout holes in the I-beams and again, connected to the control center outside.

4.       Metal sheets were stapled over the tubing, then paper with a foil backing and then insulation installed over that.

The heated water warms floors to about 85 degrees F or less, it feels like a tile floor warmed by direct sunlight.  The dogs love it! We set up zones so we can have different temperatures in different rooms.  We even put heat tubes in half of our garage.  This warms the shop and makes it more comfortable to lie on the garage floor while working on the car.

When you have radiant heat installed most of the cost of the project is labor.  So, as a “do it your selfer” you can save a lot of money by doing this yourself. 

After a lot of research we decided to go with a company called Radiantec.  http://www.radiantec.com/index.php

They were great to work with.  We sent them our house plans and they put together a plan for us and created an installation manual for us.  We also had to call them several times and they were very happy to assist us over the phone.

It was a lot of work and you need a few people to help wrangle the tubing when threading them through the knockout holes in the I-beams but it is doable and the savings is huge.