Does this price sound right?
1280 sf slab and 1125 sf second floor. Wirsbo pex pipe, labor, a Slant-fin electric EH-10 (34,000 btu/h) boiler and also Texmar controls with injection mixing and outdoor reset . Slant-Fin Hot Water Baseboards for upstairs. $10,000. Washington State. The boiler’s bigger than I think necessary, but the only smaller one is just marginally smaller, so no biggie.
Does that price sound in the ballpark, or is shopping around further still called for. The price came through UBUILDIT, which is a service I wasn’t familiar with before. The guy’s not a client, just someone who asked for advice.
Replies
Cloud...you might try posting this at:
http://www.radiantpanelassociation.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1
Bunch of RH pros frequent the site. From what I've learned there, that boiler might be a little SMALL...depending on what a heat loss calc brings up. Depends on things like R-value, number and type of openings, what you need the interior temp to be on the coldest day, etc. For a quick and dirty heat loss estimate, do a search for HeatPro.
What do you pay per KWH? Can you get a special off-peak rate?
The price also seems suspiciously LOW.
Thanks for the referral.
>From what I've learned there, that boiler might be a little SMALL...depending on what a heat loss calc brings up.
The one thing I am _sure_ of is that for the building method used, the loads will be that or less. We're usually at 1 ton/k sf or less (mine is 4 ton for 6000+ sf of interior space).
You are right about the heat loss. Too many variables to know the answer but it does seem on the low side. But then some of these houses just shock you with their low heat losses.
The price is low enough I would be very careful hiring this guy. Too likely to be taking shortcuts you should not take!
I'll have to say trust me on the loads being too high, if anything. But that aside, assuming the calcs were proper, how might a number like this break down (in general, be/c we don't have the specifics). A boiler that size runs what? 500? 1000? Installation? Tubing costs 2500? more? less? Controls? What's a rough budget for tying tubing for a slab? 1/ft? more? less? Someone told me that radiant baseboard will run at higher temp than in-floor, and therefore he'd use copper, and that makes the install more labor intensive than floor loops. Don't know if that's what's planned here or not. But if you suspect the number is low, do you have a rough breakdown of the costs in mind that add up to something more reasonable than 10? (I have better ideas of how framing, elec, stucco, and some others break down than hvac--mine was done in a way that made it hard to extrapolate to other jobs.)
Cloud did you move or is this a friend or family on the other side of the country?
Neither. I design all over the country. This isn't one of my designs, but I was asked about it, and there's lots of areas where I don't have good cost info, so I thought I'd ask here to get a sense of what's up. With hvac there seems to be a wide range of systems, with people proposing $6000 systems and people proposing $15000 systems to handle the same requirements. We have the Mercedes approach, and the Hyundai approach, and sometimes it's tough trying to help people evaluate the differences. Spending $9k extra, or whatever, takes either a leap of faith or some convincing.