Hydronic Radiant Heating – Why Your New House Should Have Hydronic Radiant Floor Heating
Finally you have saved enough money to make your dreams come true. You are building your new home! After years of financial struggles, waiting and planning, you will be soon able to sit down with your general contractor and make the final decisions on your home’s future construction.
But you still have some sticking points you are not sure about. And one of them is what type of home heating should you install. You are living in what someone has labeled a “heating-dominated climates”. Huh? Such flowery language to describe what are really long and very old winters!
And heating costs can quickly take a large bite out of your household budget. You have looked at electric heat pumps, oil or gas-based furnaces, maybe even some types of green power. This is where you may want to explore the idea of hydronic radiant heating.
What is Hydronic Radiant Heating?
Hydronic (liquid-based) heating is one of the most affordable and popular radiant heating systems for the whole home. Hydronic radiant heating supplies heat directly to floor. While hydronic can mean any type of liquid, in almost all modern built-in hydronic radiant systems use water as a heat transfer liquid.
Basically water is heated in a central boiler and then is pumped into tubing (in a preset pattern) underneath each room’s flooring, releasing heat into the room. Temperatures can be controlled by a central thermostat or via a series of water-flow valves or pumps and direct thermostats that control the settings into each room or zone.
The key to any type of radiant floor heat is convection: the natural movement of heated air from the floor to the ceiling. The longer the flooring is able to retain the heat transferred from the hot water then the warmer the room will remain. This is why flooring with a good thermal mass (capacity to store heat) is required. The best flooring is concrete and ceramic or stone tiles.
Hydronic radiant floor heating is classified by installation types: “wet” or “dry”. Wet installation is where the tubing is installed inside concrete slab or underneath a lightweight concrete coating which is then covered by tile, wood or carpet. A dry installation is where the hot water tubing is “sandwiched” in between, above or below the existing subflooring and covered by tile, plywood, hardwood or carpet.
Why Use Hydronic Radiant Heating?
While the cost on installing a hydronic radiant heating system in a new home varies from location to location it is often cheaper versus electric heating of the same type. Energy use with a hydronic radiant heating is lower than conventional heating systems and a save you a bunch of money in the long term.
This is simply because hydronic radiant heat is more efficient. Electrical baseboard heaters often don’t provide complete room coverage and create “hot spots”. While traditional forced-air heating loses much of it’s warmth through leaky or poorly insulated ducts or vents.
Not to mention that a forced-air heating system can also become a serious problem for allergy suffers or asthmatics. The lack of air movement in a liquid-based system makes hydronic radiant heating, a perfect match for those with people with respiratory problems.
Hydronic systems use very little electricity in comparison to other methods plus the central boiler can be heated with any number of sources from natural gas, propane, oil or even outdoor wood fired furnaces. This means you cam use a hydronic radiant heating in just about any type of new home construction; no matter what your budget may be.
