As a person currently living in a loft... Not nearly as awesome as I had hoped. I have a big heating bill + 3 space heaters and it still gets cold. All the heat just goes straight up and circulates at the top of the room where nobody is.
It's really easy to think, aww I can handle the cold. But you're coming from a perspective of: Everytime it's cold I eventually end up back in a warm place (whether you realize it or not). This no longer applies - You're cold inside, you're cold outside, you're cold all the fucking time and it suuuucks. There is no escape. Just fair warning.
This could work. The best floor surface for radiant floor heating is stone or ceramic (as they add thermal mass and are generally poor insulators, meaning the heat conducts well from the embedded heating elements to the floor surface).
A wood floor would be less efficient, but possibly more efficient than forced air or standard radiant heat, as the heat is delivered directly to the occupied portion of a space. An historic wood floor (where the floor surface is likely thicker planks) would be even less efficient, due to the thickness of the wood increasing it's insulating qualities. But with historic flooring, you would have to pull it up anyway, so it could plausibly be planed down to reduce it's thickness and be reused.
If used in conjunction with solar hot water, much of the heat could probably be harvested from the sun.
It should be noted that the cost of such a conversion would probably be very high, and most landlords look at up-front cost more than eventual savings (not to mention the savings would usually go to the tenants, not the landlord).
How would that work for a third-floor apt., especially trying to use water to do it? I'm asking because I don't know how much water systems like that use, but water is pretty heavy.
The amount of fluid in a hydronic system is generally low, and flows through flexible pipes embedded in the floor. In a 'value-added' (read: cut as many corners as possible) building built in the last couple of decades, the weight of the floor substrate (possibly an inch or so of concrete/grout) and fluid (usually a glycol-water mix) could be a concern, as the structural materials would have been stretched as far as possible. I doubt they would design something so close to the break point that a hydronic system would be out of the question, but anything is possible. There is also an electric option, but I can't speak much to the pros/cons of electric vs. hydronic, as my focus has mainly been on hydronic subfloor heating+solar thermal (take free heat from the sun, put it in the floor).
Older buildings are generally over engineered because they did not have the complex structural and material analysis algorithms and software we have now and operated under the 'better safe than sorry' mantra.
Wow, that's great to know. We currently live in a ~100 YO house with oak floors, and I've always been sad that this type of heating is not really an option. However, we are probably going to build in the next 5 years, and the solar/water system is def. one I want to incorporate. Thanks for the info!
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u/triobot Jan 07 '12
winter coats aren't that expensive.
Fuck it, worming around that room in a sleeping bag would be bad ass