Is radiant heating a good for cold climates with a cathedral ceiling and what lights are best?

[Mountain Man Jim]

Interesting link from the gas company. Based on their numbers you can expect to save someplace between 16% to 58% by using gas instead of electric. You need to subtract about 5% to ~15% from that savings due to the inefficiency of the gas boiler or water heater. If you can buy electric from their example of Massena Electric you would be at the low end of the cost savings. It looks like Massena has really low electric rates. Maybe they are subsidized or get their power from hydroelectric plants, either way a good deal. In short, using all electric may cost you exactly the same as using gas or you might be paying 60% more every year. It all depends on the how much you can buy the electric for. If you can, find out which power company you will be using up there. From what I've heard, we are pumping more and more natural gas out of the country's wells and natural gas prices will remain low for some time.

You can definitely use a tankless water heater instead of a boiler, though you will want to have a small, 20 gallons or so, tank to be used to add a little mass to the system. I'm reviewing a project in Aspen, CO where they started out designing around that type of a system. But, currently they are going to use a more typical natural gas, condensing, tank-type water heater to be used for both the heating and the domestic water use. I believe the tank water heater was considerably cheaper than the tankless system. To combine the heating and domestic water system, they needed to make sure they everything in the system was approved for domestic water use and included controls to circulate the water in the heating loops from time to time. Personally, I would separate the two systems. There's something about taking a shower with water that has been sitting in heating pipes for a month that just screams legionella, yuck.

Welcome to my world and good luck trying to make a decision. There are way too many options for mechanical systems.

Jim

 

[Cold Canadian]

I have a radiant heating system in my house and we get temps way lower then what you are discribeing .Our main floor is on a concrete slab so the pipes are in the concrete and it is fantastic ! I have gone with a wood boiler instead of electric, and gas is just to expencive never mind the risks of gas leaks .I cut my own wood so it is not a huge cost , but I would guess if you had to buy it then it might ,depending on if you can even burn wood where you live ?.There are a few different ways that we do it up here . you can put styro foam under the concrete to use as a barrier ( you would need piers ) or as in my case I only put styro foam around the out side footing .This way I have a floating pad with the ground being a retainer for holding heat in case it should ever fail .I did origanally start with electric heat as in the form of a hot water tank ( this works well if you put styro foam under the pad and I have been told that it is cheap to keep a home warm ) but found that it had to run far to much to hold the temp where I wanted it so I went with a boiler instead .When I switched over it was very cold and the one incoming line frooze up before we had the boiler hooked up and it took 12 hours to get it working again and the house temp dropped by a few degrees ! It's not for every one , but it is the best heat in the world , no cold spots , a few degree differance between the temp on the floor and the cieling regardless if it's a high cieling or a low one ..............good luck

 

[Oregon Blues]

reveriereptile, I don't have what would be considered traditional cathedral ceilings. My living room is a hexagon. The ceiling is a 6 sided dome. 3 walls are about 12 feet tall with gigantic windows (facing the mountain view).

There is a short wall at the base, then an enormous window and above that another window that is wide but only about 1 1/2 ft tall. If I am ever feeling rich, I will have those top windows removed and replaced with something that can be opened. Then I can open the top windows in the summer and the hot air that rises in the living room could be pushed out the opened windows at the top of the wall.

Since you don't have your plans finalized, take a look at envelope solar. The warm air that rises into your high ceilings is moved by convection currents through the walls and into the rest of the house.

 

[Oregon Blues]

 

[Mountain Man Jim]

This is so much fun … OK, maybe it’s just fun for me. Here’s the deal with the cost difference between heating with electric vs natural gas. My guess is that no one else really cares but, I was curious were the local utility got their numbers from.

Let’s assuming that the amount of heat needed to heat the house is the same for electric and gas. This is always true except for the fact that the gas appliance is about 5 to 15% less efficient depending on the model. So, the ratio of cost for using electric instead of gas is:

29.31 X ($/kWh of electric) / ($/therm of gas)

For reverie… case we find the ratio of electric cost to gas cost:

$0.056 per kWh / $1.38 per therm = 0.0406

And multiply that by 29.31:

29.31 X .0406 = 1.19

1.19 is the factor that the gas bill can be multiplied by to see what the cost would have been if electric was used instead of natural gas. Hence, the electric bill would be 19% more than the gas bill for heating.

Now here’s the fun part, reverie… is absolutely right that gas price are high and electric is low in their area. The following is a link for the national rates for energy:
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/
Based on the national rates we get:

$0.1178 per kWh / $1.085 per therm = 0.1086

So our factor is 29.31 X 0.1086 = 3.18

Hence, energy bills across the country would be 3 times as much if we used electric to heat our houses instead of gas. But, for reverie … her electric rate is about half the national rate and gas is $0.30 more per therm so, the decision to go to use gas or electric is not simple; there’s only a 19% difference. The cost of the equipment is going to be a much bigger factor than the cost to heat the house.

Another important point, this kind of analysis is only true for today. I hear natural gas prices are going to remain at current prices for a while but, who knows what’s going to happen to the electric rates???

OK, I'm done being an engineer for now ...

Jim

 

[reveriereptile]

I got talking with my FIL about natural gas and which electric company he uses. He said the Massena electric company had some type of agreement/contract and other stuff is why it is so much cheaper but they only offer it in Massena. I asked him about the natural gas and he said that we can't even get natural gas out here. The only gas we can get is propane which he said is higher than the natural gas is around here.

After talking with him we are down to the options of either using electric or propane to run the heating system. With that being said what should we use?

My FIL was wondering if we could install radiant just in the living, dining, and kitchen area (around 500 sq.ft. in a open L shape) but use another type of heating for the rest of the house? He said since we don't know if we are going to have one or more kids or if we can even have any that we shouldn't waste the money of putting radiant in those bedrooms incase we don't use the rooms much or only in one bedroom. He was wondering if the radiant in the front of the house would sort of heat them up some and just use another type of heating in them if we need them warmer.

Pretty much we are going to have 2.5 stories but the top 1.5 stories will be the main floors with the half being the master bedroom. The bottom would be used for extra storage, to make the foundation and roof smaller instead of making the house longer/wider, and as a gym and rec room. The ground is flat and the area around here has problems with flooding due to a river and swamp nearby so my husband said no to any type of basement. Other people over in the village down the road has had their basements flood. He also wanted the house raised up from the ground to give it a nicer view and build a deck outside of our living room. We mainly need to heat around less than 1,500 sq.ft. The bottom story will be unfinished at first till we get more money saved up. We did already go over the stair problem if we were unable at some point to use the stairs to get to the main floor. We figured we could get one of those chairs that you sit on to take you up the stairs or if we had older kids at the time to let them live in the upper half and us convert the bottom into a living area.

BTW, Oregon Blues, that is a very lovely room. I love those types of big sliding glass windows. I plan on putting some in our house.

For the reversible ceiling fans should they have a light on them to help light the room some or just get the ones without the light?

 

[Mountain Man Jim]

Our house was originally propane before the utility extend the gas mains into our area. Propane is more expensive than natural gas. One reason being, it has less energy per pound so, you need to use more. The one advantage I see with the propane is that it will be available in a power outage if you have generators to power the electrical portions of the heating system. I have trouble believing that you will have generators large enough to actually heat the house with an all electric system; that takes a lot of power.

Propane is a PITA though; with a tank to maintain and deliveries to schedule, etc. So, you might be best off with the all electric system.

As far as where to have the radiant heating, you can easily have the radiant heating everywhere. That’s what is done in most homes. The advantage of the radiant system (in floor or baseboard) is that it’s easy to zone or break-up into areas. Each zone will have its own thermostat and control valve so, you can turn down or off a particular zone that you don’t need. There’s some really energy savings here if you, for instance, have a temperature setpoint of 50F in the bedroom and 68F in the living room. Plus, all of these thermostats can be programmable, giving you endless options for saving energy or for wasting it.

As far a lights in the fans, why not add the lights? You are running the power up to the point, you might as well.

Jim

 

[Nitrous]

Radiant heat feels great, if you can afford to use it. I have never know anyone who had it who did not get a $600 heating bill. And where do you put it, on the second floor? I've always wanted to run thin water tubes, through the ceiling. Not enough weight to bring down the drywall, but enough so every time you use the tap, you get water that first cooled the ceiling. You'd never get *cold* water, from the tap, but you could probably survive by putting ice cubes in the water.

Woodstoves are great, but not for everyone. As much heat as you want and low cost. The flickering firelight is all romantical and stuff too. The modern ones use air from outside, to burn in the firebox, instead of sucking air from the room, into the burn area. To do that, you have to replace the air that went in, from somewhere. usually that air comes in, nice and cold, somewhere in the house. Like your dryer vent or the vent over the stove or back through the fresh air vents in the roof. Either way, someplace in your house is getting cold, every time you burn wood, in the fireplace or woodstove, without those new "outside-air" thingies.

Smaller, soapstone woodstoves are terrific for smaller areas. They only get about 400 degrees, instead of the 800+ that all-metal stoves will reach, but the soapstone stays that hot for about 8 hours, instead of cooling off immediately, after the fire goes out. And they are beautiful! You can get nice, quiet fans for them too, which make a huge difference, in how warm the rest of the house gets.

 

[Oregon Blues]

I am a big fan of ceiling lights that go on with the flick of a switch. So definitely yes, have lights with every ceiling fan. They can be wired so you have one wall switch for the lights and a different switch for the fan. Or, I've got one with a remote switch on the wall where I can control multiple speeds as well as the light.

The older you get, the more light your eyes will need, so when you get the house built, wire lots of lights in. Real lights that give serious light, not those tiny little decorative bulbs that give less light than a candle. Believe me, finding light fixtures that look good and give a lot of light is no easy task.

 

[justonehen]

Hello Reveriereptile,

Full disclosure – I am a Project Manager for Warmboard but also took the leap and installed Warmboard in our new home over 2 years ago for many of the reasons you mention. Seems it might be a good fit.

Warmboard is a 4x8, 1 1/8” thick 7 layer Doug Fir structural subfloor with thick aluminum permanently bonded the entire surface and pressed into pre-routed channels. The panels put out up to 30/btu’s sf without stratifying heat into the rafters where the spiders are, which addresses your cathedral ceilings. Heat radiates to you and critters and is not lost through the roof – saving energy. You will all be warm wherever you sit, not just in places where the tubing runs, as the previous poster points out. Since the overall coverage of the aluminum disperses the heat evenly there are no "hot spots".

It sounds like you live in an area that is venerable to electricity cutting out. With -20 degrees temperatures, we do highly recommend a back up high btu woodstove or fireplace. The slab systems that can store heat for 24 hours may seem like a good concept, but after a few hours the house temperature will drop, and you will start up the wood heat anyway. This feature of a slab releasing heat for 24 hours after the heat of off can be a very frustrating experience in the spring and fall months when the heat is needed only for a day or two, or perhaps heat is just needed in the evening and morning. The most common complaint of a traditional concrete radiant floor system is the ability to control it. These concrete mass systems create a flywheel effect, which is a very slow to start releasing heat and very slow to stop releasing heat. This for a homeowner can be disappointing, especially if you find out there are newer technologies available in radiant panel designs, that will offer fast radiant heat, with the ability to turn the heat up, down, or off as you desire.

Cathedral ceilings and lots of windows sound like a lovely way to enjoy the winters! Definitely get a heat loss calculation done to see how many btu’s you’ll need for the coldest day of the year in your area. No supplemental heat is needed 99% of the time using Warmboard.

I agree with Mountain Mike. Good news is the industry standard to prevent freezing is simple and similar to your automobile radiator. Add a 30% propylene glycol solution and you’ll be all set even with the arctic like -20 degree temperatures.

The tubing is air pressurized once installed so that any possible punctures are detected and repaired. Leaks are not common.

You can expect to run at very low water temperatures – some of this will be determined by floor coverings. Carpet having a higher R-Value (insulative property) than tile or hardwood would typically be zoned separately to accommodate the difference. A properly zoned layout will take this into account. More good news is that you won’t need as much tubing or manifolds to achieve the same result- more savings. Running tubing at closer spacings at the perimeter as Mike astutely cautions, isn’t necessary with Warmboard.

Since it installs as your subfloor – if you can install subfloor you will have no problem following the custom layouts. The panels are heavier than ¾” subfloor but the labor savings of getting 3 steps in one is worth it!

Hope that helps!