My wife is insisting on having radiant floor heating (RFH) installed when we build our new house. I did some research on it and it sounds pretty convincing. But I have a bunch of questions...
1) has anyone in the group had first hand practical experience installing and/or using RFH and what are they?2) what are the drawbacks that aren't described in the "pro" RFH literature?
3) I will have a basement in the house of about 2300 sqft plus an oversized garage at the basement level. Do you recommend installing RFH there too?4) If I use RFH in the basement should I have it put into the concrete floor? I'm concerned about what I would guess is an enormous cost/effort/inconvenience fixing a leak that develops within the concrete. So I'm considering installing it on top of the concrete and installing a plywood subfloor on sleepers on top of the concrete. Is this idiotic?
Regarding RFH for the first floor, I'm planning on using PEX stapled to the underside of the subflooring with the use of aluminum heat difusers. I know there are other systems where you can get subflooring material that has the tubing embedded in it. Just seems to me that 1 poorly placed nail any you're in for real trouble with that type of system. So...
5) Any comments on that type of installation?Also...
6) What can you comment about the subfloor and the hardwood flooring's ability to withstand the 100-120F temps and the variations? Any suggestions about the materials (assuming I want hardwood flooring)?And regarding the furnace, I was reading about one of the drawbacks of this typ of system is that when you use PEX tubing, even the aluminum clad ones, there's still a certain amount of Oxygen pentration. Because of that you need to be sure that you have ABSOLUTELY NO ferrous materials in the systm that the heated water will come in contact with. So, to a large extent you're stuck using a pretty expensive Stainless Steel heater. I was wondering why I couldn't use a standard glass lined hot water heater. The benefits would be: a) lower cost for the hardware, b) one heater/zone eliminates the single point of failure and c) because I could set the temp of the HWH to 120 I could avoud the cost of the expensive "mixing" valves that seem common in RFH systems. So...
7) any comments on using cheapo HWH's to as the heat source?And as some additional info, the house to be built is a 3200sqft ranch with full basement. It will be in downeast Maine, Bar Harbor to be exact. There's no natural gas available there so I plan on using Propane or possibly oil heat.
Finally, if you've read this far, thanks for your patience. I'm sure I'll have a bunch more questions. But I will post summaries of the most useful info I gather.
Thanks