If you already have a boiler and hydronic heating in your house, it makes sense to tap into the existing system and heat the basement off the same boiler. Your cost for heating the basement will be only incrementally higher than what is now costing you to heat the rest of the house. Electric heating in the basement would would probably cost many times more. If the heating guy who gave you the $2900 price is the same guy who installed your boiler or heating system, then it probably makes sense to have him do the work. He knows the system. You might ask him if there's any other way of tapping into the existing system that might cost less. Perhaps running baseboard radiators that begin on the wall enclosing the boiler room (I'm assuming your boiler is somewhere in the basement), or something else. If the heating guy is someone that hasn't worked in your house before, then why not get a couple of other estimates from other firms. Another outfit may offer a better solution that's less costly, or perhaps, just have lower overhead and do the work for less. Since you plan to be in the house for many years, I'd encourage you to avoid the electric solution. What you save up front will probably cost you much more in the long run.

We're doing a basement renovation project, creating a rec room/guest room and new full bath. We do have some forced air heating in the big room, but want some additional heating that can be used to supplement the forced air so that we don't have to crank up the furnace in other spaces to make the basement temp bearable. We're hoping to install it over Marmoleum in the big room and ceramic tile in the bathroom. Some questions I hope someone might have insight on: -- Brand: We've had NuHeat and Warmly Yours recommended to us. Comments on either company, or another suggestion? Or suggestions on how to choose between companies? -- Coverage: We're hoping we don't need to cover the whole floor in the 13x22 ft big room. Any comments on the effectiveness if just a smaller area is covered in a large room? -- Appropriate product for under Marmoleum: any comments on use under Marmoleum? Is heating the glue going to produce serious off-gassing? Many TIA!!! Jess

If I could add one thing here, as a person who lives in a house with electric baseboard heat: I have found that electric baseboard heaters foster high heat loss, perhaps because they excessively heat the wall above the heater, causing more rapid heat loas to the outdoors. (If my memory of high school science and "Delta T" is accurate.) In addition, following standard HVAC practice they're often placed below windows, further accelerating heat loss for the same reason. Realizing that all electric resistance heat is the same 100 percent efficient (but not cheap, owing to high electric rates compared to other energy sources) this is the only way I can account for the fact that using plug-in electric space heaters (generally fan-forced units) in the house will cause the rooms to be warmer for less energy cost. If this were my house I'd look at the fan-forced electric wall-mount heaters. For one thing they're way faster to warm a room than baseboard, and they're safer than infrared, which operate by design at high temperatures. Plus, putting a infrared heater into a wall kind of defeats its purpose: As they are used to heat objects and people directly, infrared heaters are ideally portable units that you can point in the direction where heat is desired. Having said that, I put an infrared heater in the wall of my bathroom, but that's a small room and there aren't many places you can be. But tell you what, I'd be scared of it in a rental house because if you'd leave a towel or something draped in front of it, that infrared heater could start a fire in no time. Fan-forced wall heaters have limit switches that will shut them off if they're covered. Also, to reply to the above, "quartz technology" would be meaningless in an electric furnace. If you embed the units inside an electric furnace where they're not physically exposed to the people and objects you want to heat, you're just turning them into conventional heating elements that heat air by forced convection. Quartz elements are simply designed to operate at a higher temperature so a higher share of their heat can be given off as radiation. You still get one total watt of heat for every watt of electricity you run through it - it's just that you can direct that watt straight at people and feel warm far sooner, as you have pointed out. By the way this is the fallacy of those costly $200+ heaters that look like wooden boxes. If you stick any kind of element in that heater, or use light bulbs, quartz tubes or whatever, you get the same amount of heat, as any radiation effect of whatever element you use is simply absorbed by the box itself and then convected to the room air the same as any $15 heater from a discount store. Just another option to consider.

In the 90’s, portable ceramic heaters were “high tech” and popular at the old cabin. I have two of those, as room heaters... I am planning to buy an Envi this fall for next winter. I have the old ceramics, but want to try something new. I am in CA, electricity is expensive. I want something to “keep the chill off” vs heating. I just wear a sweater.