Radiant Heat Systems
Radiant heating is growing in popularity because it’s a clean, quiet, efficient, dependable, and cost-effective way to heat your home in the winter or just make your floors more comfortable.
With radiant heating, heat comes from wires installed under your floor tile. Wires are placed under the floor material delivering heat to the surrounding space, quietly and invisibly, in a constant, uniform way.
Believe it or not, radiant heating is one of the oldest forms of heating known to humankind. While the Romans are often given credit for creating radiant heat, in actuality, both archeology and research into ancient texts have proven that radiant heating came to be thousands of years before the Romans in Asia.
Thousands of years later, in-floor heating has evolved into one of the fastest-growing, most cost-effective and efficient ways to heat your house.
PM Engineer Magazine reports that radiant heating is growing in popularity each year in both new and retrofits across the U.S. And according to Scientific American, radiant systems transmit heat on average some 15% more efficiently than conventional radiators.
Benefits of Radiant Heating
Radiant heating systems offer a lot of benefits to homeowners, including the following:
1. Energy-Efficient
Radiant heating is more efficient than baseboard and forced-air heating because it eliminates duct losses. And, while traditional heaters are usually cranked to 149-167 Fahrenheit, floor radiant heating runs at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. For that reason, it consumes less energy.
2. Quiet Heating
Radiant heating systems are entirely quiet. Unlike forced-air systems, you won’t hear vents turning on and off all day, and no more clinging radiators either — just a silent, warm home.
3. Allergy-Friendly
People who suffer from allergies will appreciate radiant heat. No ductwork means that dust and other allergens won’t spread through air vents in your house, allowing you to breathe cleaner and easier.
4. Consistent Temperature
Since warm air rises, radiant floor heating is the perfect way to deliver a consistent temperature throughout a home. The heat that the floors emit will travel upwards, thus warming the whole room to an even temperature.
5. Less Arid Conditions
Every time you turn up the thermostat in a forced-air heating system, your furnace sucks humidity out of your house. This can leave you with dry air, dry skin, and painful sinuses. Radiant heat will help humidity levels in your home.
6. Scalable
You don’t have to jump all in when it comes to adding radiant heat to your house. Instead, if you don’t want to install radiant heat throughout the house, you can choose to heat one or two rooms.
7. Aesthetically Pleasing
Radiant heating allows you to remove unsightly radiators and return vents on the floors and ceilings. With heated floors or walls, you can remove wall-mounted radiators and open the room up.
8. No Need for Ductwork
There is no need for ductwork for radiant heating to work properly. No ductwork means one less major thing to worry about during annual maintenance.
9. Floor Covering Options
Radiant floor heating works with almost every single type of floor finishing: laminate, tile, wood, concrete, and stone.
10. No More Cold Feet
Maybe the best perk of all, say goodbye to cold feet. Radiant heating means warm floors and warm feet around-the-clock, which is especially nice on those cold winter days when you’re stepping out of bed or out of the shower.
Households and commercial buildings account for nearly 40% of total U.S. energy use. As long as heating, cooling and lighting remain the single largest energy end-uses in a home, there will be an increased interest in finding and implementing energy-efficient building practices.
Radiant heating systems offer energy-efficient and cost-effective way to heat your home while saving hundreds of dollars on home heating bills.
Recent Radiant Heat System Projects
