Heating the large common space
My partner and I will do small spec house to sell to vacation home buyers, up here in the frozen wastelands of New York’s northern Adirondack region. I am trying to educate myself as to the heating needs of this place so that when my chosen heating contractor gets back to me with a proposal, I am not flying totally blind. The large mainfloor space that includes the foyer, greatroom, stairway down, and eat-in kitchen, all without any wall separation, is my big worry. It had better be able to be heated comfortably, and our morning temp two days ago was minus 27. It can get colder than that, sometimes. The pic below shows the room spaces. I downloaded SlantFin’s heat loss calc program, and ran the numbers for the “room” that includes the foyer, stairway downstairs, greatroom, and eat-in kitchen. There’s a whole lotta outside wall, a lot of glass, and a vaulted ceiling going from 9/0 to 13/9. I plugged in the data, and came up with 40,743 Btu/h of heat loss. Floor radiant is not even possible for a solution . . . there is only 444 sf of floor available. I went to the Myson site and started to digest specs for steel panel radiators and fan convectors. Here is what I came up with. At the large gable end wall with most all the glass, two panel radiators, Eclipse IVC PP 22 60160 (11,311 Btu/h each), in the toekick under the kitchen sink, one toekick WH II 9000 fan convector (10,875), and over adjacent the stairway down, one lowmount 14-10 fan convector (14,250). The total comes to 47,747 Btu/hr. This, all at 180 water temp. View Image The boiler, TBA (I’m liking Munchkin but don’t know anything) will be LP fired, and the large room has a gas fireplace, a Heat&Glo that is capable of supplying a lot of heat, but you cannot figure a fireplace into the equation, right?
Am I on the right track here? Is it better to overdesign, as I have done?
Replies
I'm wondering if there shouldn't be provision for air circulation between rooms, to better utilize the fireplace heat, make use of any solar you get through the windows, and maybe in summer make use of cooler air from downstairs.
It's hard to believe that the room is going to lose more heat than can be provided with in floor radiant, especially since it is above a heated room.
I must be missing something.
Beer was created so carpenters wouldn't rule the world.
The very best you can get from infloor radiant is 30 Btu/h, and for the approximately 500 sf of floor we could get tubing under, that only yields 15,000 Btu/h, or less than a third of the total heat loss for the space.
The large run of exterior wall, the wall height, the ceiling vaulting from 9/0 to 13/9, windows, doors, and the big factor, the -25 outside design temp, are all contributors to the large heating requirement.
In fact, -25 might be suspect as the outside design temp. It was -27 here a couple mornings ago, and I've experienced -32, while the record books talk of deeper drops than that.
Gene, I'm just an amatuer here, & definitely don't live in your environment, so please consider the source of the question. Wouldn't 14 K btu coming out of the toe kick heater be an awful lot on someone's feet, or rising in their face if they were standing at the sink?