Radiant floor heating questions
Hi all,
I have an old house with steam radiators. We would like to change to radiant floor heating and have a couple questions. We can do staple-up in the basement easy enough to handle to first floor and we’ve been anticipating redoing the entire 2nd floor down to the subfloor since we moved in several years ago. I was thinking of using warm-board (subfloor and tubing in a single layer) and then hardwood over that.
Questions…
1. Is is possible to do the 1st floor now and the 2nd floor at a later time? That is, do you think the steam system will continue to work well (enough) if we take the first floor pipes out of the picture?
2. We’ve also been considering a tankless/pilotless system for hot water — can we use that (or a second one) for the radiant system too?
3. Any good/bad experience with warm-board?
Thanks
John
Replies
'Couple of things:
1...what's wrong with the steam heat? Radiators and radiant floor are really only two different ways of heating the objects in the room instead of the air. So you already have radiant heat. Granted, the cozy feeling with the whole floor being warm is different and rather nice.
2...the boiler and control strategy for the steam heat is entirely different than what is required for radiant floor. The fluid temperatures in a proper radiant floor system are far lower than those required for steam or regular hot water radiators for that matter. In other words you can't just hook up your steam boiler to the radiant floor tubes. You may need an entirely different boiler, piping, and control system. That's alright if your current system in on its last legs, but it sounds like it's still working.
That being said, you could conceivably put in the first half...the staple up with matching boiler and controls, sized for both levels but throttled down for just the lower half and make it through the first year with higher fuel bills...higher because the ineffiecuencies of both systems will impact your fuel usage.