Radiant countertops
mudflap
11 years ago
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Radiant heating and regular heating/AC?....
Comments (13)Placing the PEX for radiant heating is relatively easy. What's not so easy is determining if this is a waste of money for you. It was for us. 1.)We live in the South, where the cooling season is longer than the heating season. Very little chance of payback unless you operate the system for longer periods. The smart boilers needed to accurately control a system in a temperate climate are pretty spendy and complicated and not very DIYable. 2.)We have wide temperature swings, sometimes daily, which magnifies the slowness of the "thermal mass pendulum." We see this just with our heated bathroom floors (separate system). It's going to be 42° tonight, so turning on the heated floors will feel good. You have to think about that a couple of hours in advance, because it takes that long to warm up. By the time they're warm, they're too warm for most of the timeframe except for that brief period that was 42°. The next day when the swing is back up to 60° and the floors are still 80°, the bathroom is too hot and needs a window opened for comfort. 3.) We insulated the new addition so well that a plain 110 volt 1500 w spaceheater can keep it 60° in the winter, and a 2 ton AC in the summer. If we'd put the money we spent on PEX towards additional insulation (we just used 2x6 construction with "standard" type insulation instead of the new high tech products) then the simple addition of the forced air furnace would have been more than sufficient for truly comfortable heating in the winter. For many people who have a long heating season and awkward spaces that forced air isn't comfortable for, radiant heating can work "miracles". For people in warmer climates, or in climates with great daily temperature fluctuations, a radiant system is very often not the best choice for either comfort or the pocketbook. Do your research well, and don't get caught up in the hype thinking it's a "must have". It isn't. And, it's sometimes even a drawback to comfort. We've never fired up the radiant in the addition. We've never needed to, even in 0° weather. And the bathrooms do work wonderfully well (imagine 6 cats lying on their backs in bliss!) but are also inefficient monetarily and for true comfort when confronted with wide temperature swings in a day. They are great when the temps say in the 40's and below for extended periods of time, but that't not how our winters here operate. It's 40 for a couple of days, then back up to 55°, then down to the high 20's, then 70° (must be Christmas day!) and then you have a 50° drop into the teens and on down to 0°. Radiant isn't very efficient or comfortable with weather like that....See MoreRadiant Heat Electric vs Hydronic
Comments (3)Since the electric cables will probably be in contact with the slab, and since the slab is probably thermal-bridged to the outdoors or to mother earth, I'll agree that it might not be a suitable solution in this case. In this case, consider putting cables under a 2cm quartz countertop and the 2cm quartz side panel at the end of the countertop run. The goal here is to keep it warm, generating constant heat, radiating constantly. Not so hot that it would melt butter. But, there is still a lot of information unknown, unwritten, unexpressed so far. It may be possible to heat a thin ceramic tile (e.g. Kerlite) and to install a thin membrane between the slab and the heating cables. Post again. It IS possible to get sufficient heat from electric cables to heat the kitchen entirely. There are many reasons for this. It is a lot of work to write it all out, and later to refute the naysayers who find it hard to believe, so I will abstain from this work at this time....See MoreRadiant heat stone slab on wall?
Comments (3)I doubt that an electric mat behind a stone slab will be sufficient to heat a room. Those mats are designed to take the chill off of a cold floor. They aren't designed to provide room heat. Your best bet, if you don't want to install new radiators or baseboard units tied into your existing heating system, are the electric toe kick heaters described above, or some other sort of built-in electric space heater. There are a number of small wall-mounted fan-driven units available. If you have the wall space available, you might also consider electric radiator/towel warmer units available from several companies. I use units from Runtal in my bathrooms. They keep my bathrooms nice and toasty (not to mention keeping the towels dry and nice and warm!). I'm not sure how well they'd perform when it comes to keeping larger spaces warm. Here is a link that might be useful: Runtal Towel Warmer/Radiators...See Morenorth carolina--where's the radiant heat?
Comments (13)meghane - I don't think that's a fair assessment of NC builders at all. I think wanting to stick with what they know is very, very typical of builders in general - it's not specific to NC. It's annoying, but not regional. Although radiant heat is not the norm, we have two homes in NC (one built in the 50's, one new) with radiant in-floor heat in some areas. It's neither a new technology nor something that's difficult to get done in NC. The only homes on slab I see are in price ranges where radiant heat would be unusual, regardless of location. One of the biggest surprises I experienced when we moved to NC from an expensive NYC suburb was how much better-maintained the older homes were and how much more attractive the new homes were. Standards are CLEARLY much higher, at least in the under $2 mio. range. I have no idea if building technology is more advanced in places like CA or FL, but I really don't think the northeast or middle Atlantic has anything on NC. I'm not that familiar with the Durham area, but perhaps you are surrounded by cheap, dorm-style housing. What you are describing does not hold true in Asheville, Boone, Blowing Rock, Charlotte, or the coastal areas....See Moremudflap
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