I had a similar situation -- I lost all my walls where I could have baseboard heat. Went from a constricted to open floor plan. Instead of going the toekick route -- I went radiant floor heat. If you have access to the floor from below, and your floor will be tile or stone, it wasn't all that different than adding a zone like your hydronic toekick heater would be. I did all the work myself. 1. Add zone to heating system 2. Add Taco RMB -1 controller (computer control, takes care of mixing, activating boiler, etc) ~ 1,000 3. Add manifolds 4. Staple aluminum fins bottom of subfloor, run tubing in joist bays 5. Add insulation This will likely be a few thousand more than the toekick hydronic heating, but on a wintry day -- your feet will thank you! I did this in two rooms, one room I used the staple up method from below, for the kitchen tile, and the other I embedded the tubing in 2 inches of concrete under a wood floor (I have a sunken dining room where I could get away with the concrete). Mind you, a quote to do the same work from a plumber was $40,000. This was likely a way of saying "I don't want to do this work, but if you are stupid enough to pay me that much, I will" For the tubing for 2 rooms, aluminum plates, clips for tubing, 2 manifolds, 2 controllers, piping, zone valve, 2 thermostats, etc -- all in I was talking a little less than 5k. BEST MONEY EVER SPENT! If you are interested in going this route, I can help via pictures model #'s etc. If you have a good honest plumber, I am sure their charge would be less than my quote. The biggest pain is snaking the tubes in the bays - which anyone can do if they have patience and your plumber would likely charge less if you took care of that part for him...

I have to run out but will try to answer some (if not all!) of your questions later tonight. Here are some close-up pics of our Turbonics kickheaters: First pic is the side of the island facing our pantry wall and the doorway to the kitchen. Second pic is the side of the island facing the sink wall. We used the black plastic grates supplied with the units--they fade away and are barely visible unless you are looking for them. They do (or did) offer metallic-look plastic (much like the silver pedal on our trash cab opener I'd imagine), but we opted to stick with the ones we had. We have ours hooked up to switches seen here (had the switchplate made to custom specs by arnev.com--took a few tries to get it right, and DH had to carve out the back of the final version a little to fit the switches in snugly, but the end result is perfect): There are various options for hooking them up as you seem to already know; with or without having them hooked up to the switches, including running both (or in your case, all three) units off one switch. We mostly run ours on low speed, unless it's bitterly cold, and we want to jump-start the warming! :-) Anyway, have to run, but will pop in later with more info. FWIW, we are very happy with ours, and our plumber, who tried to talk us out of getting kick-heaters, was impressed with these when he installed them and tested them out. PS If you do a search at the bottom of the Kitchen Forum page, you might find some older threads with some of my posts about Turbonics.

Definitely more of a white noise category, than something really annoying, Mags438. We do keep ours on Lo (except for a "kick-start" on Hi on super cold, or damp-chill mornings/evenings). We find ourselves bumping up the TV volume when the kick-heater fans are going (as we do when we run the range hood), but we find ourselves needing to do so more and more often as time marches on! :) MarthaSINY, I don't recall any significant increase in our electric bills after we started using our kick heaters. Also, we vaulted the ceiling(s) in the kitchen/DR (now LR), during our reno, which probably caused an increase in our central a/c needs during the summer, or requiring more heat to warm up the space in the winter. So, if our bills did rise, it would be hard to say what caused them to do so. Again, I don't think the fans increased our electric bill by much, if at all. This post was edited by cat_mom on Sun, Sep 14, 14 at 22:12

I would try replacing the door panels with caning first. (If you have cats, Lowe's sells metal decorative caning in the same patterns but you risk rust). The caning can be varnished, stained, dyed, or painted to match. You just need to have your front panels removed (easy job for a router with a flush trim bit) leaving just the frames. Then on the back route a small dado (groove) around the perimeter. The cane is then forced into the grove with spline. Trim the excess and you're all set. One wouldn't think that you'd get enough heat with the radiator where it is, but I assume it's been in there for a while, so who knows? If the caning doesn't work, next year you'll have to move or replace the radiator. Is your system steam or hot water? If it's hot water Donaleen has a great suggestion if the retrofit isn't too problematic. Hopefully it's not too difficult to get to the existing radiator now that the cabinet has been installed around it. With pex pipe now in common use, a radiator can be shoe horned in just about anyplace where it would make sense to have one, and a good salvage yard should have an abundance of sizes and shapes to choose from.