Slab heating advice: fact or fiction

[GraemeCook]

It's all about insulation. R-30 in the ceiling and R-19 in the walls of the addition. We also added the R-30 to the old part of the house.

Rich is using the American R-system - just divide by 5.78 to convert. So American R-30 and R-19 are the same as the metric R-5.3 and R-3.3 respectively.

We also lived in the States - in Boston where temperatures hover around ten degrees farenheight below freezing from Christmas to Easter - and had an oil fired hydronic system. There were small skirting panels about 2 000mm x 200mm x 50mm under each window. They heated the house uniformly in about 15 minutes; silent and no fumes or drafts. Walls had about 150mm insulation plus clapboards and triple glazed windows.

This was a very effective system, comfortable and easy to use.

We looked at doing similar in Australia but the equipment does not seem to be available. All advertisers of hydronic systems seem to be concentrating on the commercial market only.

Cheers

Graeme

[silkwood]

We've had underfloor electric and hated it for all of the aforementioned reasons. Even the newer electronic contol systems can't overcome the lag problem We now have ducted gas (including filter!!!) and love it. With a tiled floor you get some benefit of the maintained heat concept but without the downside. Needs good insulation to be most effective though. Worst part is there is no visible heat and I keep forgetting to turn it off! (yeah I should set the auto controls but I keep forgetting that too! Maybe I should do it now? Oops, news is on!)

Cheers,

[Guy]

Have you considered placing a slab then laying polystyrene sheets with slots cut in for polyproperlyne piping, which gets run off to a furnace somewhere. You can set it up so each room has there own set of controls which pump the water around. Then you can place either a floating floor or timber on top of it all.
Saw it on Lifestyle channel about 2 weeks ago, UK prog about these idiots building there houses, also This Old house has used something similar

[Grunt]

I'm going to put hydronic heating in our house when I actually get around to build it.

We're going to use a Quantum hot water system which is a heat pump heater. It's very cheap method of producing hot water and it produces hot water year around, day or night. It will produce 800 litres of hot water a day.

The Quantum won't have the power to do the whole house but I'm only going to heat the living areas.

Quantum Energy

Combined Slab Heating & Hot Water

Chris