Radiant Floor Heating
Burns HVAC LLC is your local radiant floor heating specialist. Radiant floor heating, which is popular in new construction, has innovated recently to become a viable retrofit option for homeowners.
Radiant floor heating systems supply heat directly to the floor in your home or business using radiant heat transfer — the delivery of heat directly from the hot surface (flooring) to the people and objects in the room via infrared radiation.
Radiant heating is the effect you feel from a hot fireplace or a sunny window from across the room. Your face feels warm, but the fireplace or sun didn’t need to heat the air to make you feel that way.
Radiant floor heating is arguably the ideal home heating system. It’s comfortable, efficient, unobtrusive, quiet, and does not blow dust and allergens around the way forced hot air systems do. Instead of overheating the room’s perimeter in the hopes that the warm air will travel throughout the space before rising, subfloor heating serves up heat from below. The result is a more even overall heat that warms everything in the room, including surfaces, furnishings, and, most importantly, you.
Hydronic radiant floor heating systems are usually designed to heat an entire house. Water is heated to between 100 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit by a boiler and circulated through tubing under floors. The tubing can be installed in several ways: embedded in a concrete slab, installed over an existing slab in cement, stapled under subflooring, or fitted inside the channels of specially designed subfloor panels. Any kind of finished flooring, including hardwood strip flooring, vinyl, or carpeting, can be installed above it.
Hydronic radiant floor systems save energy and lower fuel bills because radiant heat feels comfortable at lower air temperatures, enabling you to lower the thermostat. Further savings can be realized because running a high-efficiency boiler at lower temperatures will increase its lifespan. In addition, hydronic radiant heat is more efficient than other systems because it uses relatively low water temperatures to heat your home. In effect, the entire floor is a radiator, so it doesn’t have to be as hot as conventional radiators. Boilers can heat water to lower temperatures more efficiently than they can heat water to higher temperatures.
For new construction, a hydronic radiant floor system is likely to cost more than forced hot air (ducts and registers) or hydronic systems (baseboard radiators). In the long run, however, it will save money due to lower thermostat settings and higher efficiency. The cost of retrofitting hydronic radiant flooring varies depending upon whether there is access to the subfloor and the extent to which flooring and ceilings must be torn out and reinstalled.