Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: ancillary heating questions

[Casey Morrigan (cjmorr]

Ruth, a couple of things to think about:

I have radiant heat under wall to wall carpets upstairs.  I do notice the
radiant heat up there - the carpet feels warm to the touch and the air heats
up.  It does work under the carpets.  I haven't measured its efficiency
relative to the efficiency of the in-slab heating downstairs but I am sure
your builder is right - it is less efficient.  But it still works.  If you
were to lay an area rug over either the carpeting or the slab floor
downstairs,, it would also be less efficient, but I'd still feel the heat.

We thought during construction about having second floor concrete, too, so
we could have radiant heat upstairs.  Building such a non-traditional way
would have taken us outside our budget and outside the comfort zone of our
builder.   Would have required a great deal of figuring out and reworking if
plans to see how to support such a heavy second floor.  We decided not to go
that way.

I like our radiant heating.  But I don't love it, no.  Our heating bills
aren't so much lower.  It's noisier than I was led to believe.  But... I
love not having heated air forced into the house.  And the reason it works
so well in our house is that the concrete slab on the ground floor provides
a big thermal mass that keeps us cool in the summer, and with our southern
orientation (not a purposeful passive solar design, just happened to be
built this direction) it picks up a lot of heat in the winter!  So we don't
have to turn the heat on that much.  Of course, our double glazed windows,
good insulation, and sharing one outside wall with another household have a
big impact on how warm the house stays, as well. These factors are as
important as what kind of heat you install.

Ask your builder if you can go somewhere where these alternatives have  been
installed, so you can see for yourself how they work.  And if you have a
good builder, trust him or her and listen to them. I told myself the purpose
was to get the thing built and I could make changes I needed later after I
lived in the house a while.

We don't have zones in our floors, and at least one of us (of 14 houses) has
needed to buy space heaters to heat north-facing rooms when we don't want to
heat the whole second floor.  It's an easy solution.

Casey Morrigan

-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of HeidiNYS [at] aol.com
Sent: Saturday, December 07, 2002 8:00 AM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: [C-L]_ancillary heating questions


Dear All,

Thanks for some input on Radiant Floor Heat.

Haven't fully formulated all questions.
One that keeps coming up is:
It is easy & affordable & practical to do in slab on ground floor.
Builders [ 2 so far!] balk at doing it upstairs.  Of course, to us, that is
where it's most desirable,for walking around barefoot!!!
Seems that upstairs mean putting heat coils between joists, under floor,
else
laying a lightweight concrete floor in order to put coils there.    Builder
thinks it's most sensible to do on ground floor, and baseboard-hot water
heat
upstairs.  He brought up two reasons that it may not be practicable
upstairs:

One is that you don't really notice radiant heat under rugs.  The other is
that having our oriental area rugs on top of radiant floor heat willl
minimize it's efficiency.....  do you know if this is so????

The major one, of course, is: if you have it, do oyu love it??  Are you
thrilled you did it??

Please feel free to give any input you have re; this/technical info you may
have,
many thanks,
best,  Ruth Hirsch Cantines Island CoHo,  Saugerties, NY.
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