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I’m currently looking at a property to purchase, rehab, and sell. It’s a two family with a tenant downstairs and a vacant upstairs apartment. The apartment upstairs has no heat at all. The first floor apartment has an existing hot water system. My question is what would be a cost effective method of heating the second floor apartment? The second floor is about 1100 square feet. Is electric baseboard heat out of the question? There is also a walk-up attic accessible from the second floor.
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Electric baseboards are going to be the easiest and cheapest installation. However they will cost the most to operate. But if you plan to sell it soon, a lot of buyer are not very savy about heating costs and wouldn't discount the hoius much for having such a $$$ method of heating.
If you were to to live in it yourself, an expansion of the downstairs hot water system would be cheaper to operate. Whether you put in hot-water baseboard, retrofit radiant floors, or have hot-water based forced air, it would be cheaper to operate (assuming the hot water is generated with natural gas or fuel oil).
The cheapest way to get heat upstairs is to cut in vents from the heated floor below. But those vents will transmit a lot of sound and is not desirably for bedrooms unless you build silencers into all the duct runs. It does the advantages of keeping the upstairs (bedrooms) a little cooler than the downstairs (public rooms). -David
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I'm currently looking at a property to purchase, rehab, and sell. It's a two family with a tenant downstairs and a vacant upstairs apartment. The apartment upstairs has no heat at all. The first floor apartment has an existing hot water system. My question is what would be a cost effective method of heating the second floor apartment? The second floor is about 1100 square feet. Is electric baseboard heat out of the question? There is also a walk-up attic accessible from the second floor.