Radiant Heating
Comfortable Green Brownstone
Here is a great image. It shows the true value of a Brooklyn brownstone green renovation.
This is something you can’t put a price to. It is like the credit card advertisement:
Insulation $10
Radiant floor $15
Fiberglass Windows $12
Watching your baby play naked while it snows outside: Priceless
This photo really shows the immediate value of doing a good [...]
Radiant Floor Problems
We just had a hell of a time finding a problem in the radiant floor system of the Brooklyn Green Show House. Some of the zones in the house didn’t heat up.
Try as we might we couldn’t figure out why. We tested pump pressure, we made sure we hadn’t crossed pipes somewhere, we tested the [...]
Methods of Installing Radiant Floors
People get confused by the many ways of installing radiant floors. Some are better than others but it depends on the situation. In a NY brownstone radiant floor installation you may not have the head room and thus need to install under the floor. Or your floor may not be able to support a concrete [...]
Radiant Floor Aluminium Fin Alternative
We are installing radiant floor heating with pex tubes. We had a set of challenges:
The floor height was low or the floor already had wood flooring on top of it.
In both these cases it did not work to put pex tubing OVER the subfloor. So we had to hang it below the sub floor. This [...]
The Maple Floor Fiasco
We found about 500sq.ft. of 5 inch wide maple plank flooring in a dumpster. It had a very slight warp to it due to it not being installed correctly. But with a little sanding we could get rid of that.
So we happily installed the flooring.
Despite our good intentions there were complications….
1. Maple is not a [...]
Adding a Concrete Sub Floor Heat Collector
I’ve put pex tubes between joists under the subfloor. that is how my
radiant guy designed it. The whole theory that as long as you contain
the heat it will get to the room eventually etc, etc. I also couldn’t
put them above the floor due to a low ceiling.
Since then I have realized the virtue of using [...]
Sound Proofing and Heat Transfer Subfloor
We have a floor with a high ceiling which means we can lay the pex tubing on top of the subfloor instead of hanging the tubing beneath. The pex tubing takes up valuable space and you can only lay it on top of the subfloor if you have the ceiling height.
Having the tubing on top [...]
Ordering Radiant Heat Materials
There are a lot of radiant heat companies out there. The abundance can be confusing. We have found that certain stores offer the best of certain products.
Here is an example for an order form from one of our vendors:
Three Types of Heat Transfer
When talking heat there are three ways heat or cold moves through space. Knowing these ways is important because it determines what kind of insulation you use or on the opposite end what kind of heating to use.
Convective heat transfer is what most of us are familiar with. This is how our forced air heating [...]