Our next system is called hydronic radiant floor heating, and it is by far the most popular type of floor heating. Hydronic View in gallery Image from Pinterest. If they do, and you have concrete floors, you can heat the floor and turn the heating off. This heating system is ideal if your electric company charges for time of use. ElectricĮlectric radiant floor heating uses electric cables that are built into the floor. Each one comes with its own set of pros and cons, so perhaps another type of radiant floor heating is right for you. While most people use one type of radiant floor heating, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other options. There are many reasons this is better than traditional heating systems, which is what we’ll get into later.īut first, let’s talk about the different types of radiant floor heating and which ones are the most popular. The heat is conducted through the flooring instead of through the air. Radiant heating is what you feel when the sun shines down on you when you’re standing by the window or the heat you feel from a stovetop when hovering above. Today, we use infrared radiation to heat with radiant flooring. How Radiant Floor Heating Works View in gallery Image from Pinterest. From there, radiant heating slowly evolved into what we have today. But their way was forgotten and radiant flooring ceased to exist until the early 1900s when the first type of radiant heating was invented via radiant panels. They would even leave space for the heat to travel in slots in the walls. Then, a “praefurnium,” or wood-fired furnace, was put below the floor. The Romans had underfloor heating called a “hypocaust.” Their floor was raised with pillars with spaces left between them. We’ve come a long way since then, but the gist is the same. In Ancient Rome, slaves would stoke fires underneath elevated flooring to warm their masters. Radiant floor heating has been around for thousands of years. History Of Radiant Floor Heating View in gallery Image from Flickr. Find out if it’s right for you today with this guide, including the pros and cons of such a heating system. This type of heating is quickly becoming the hottest way to heat any house. But with those heating systems come an array of issues. Most houses use furnaces, fireplaces, or gas heaters to heat their home. In contrast, the hydronic system uses relatively little electricity – which is consumed mostly to run a compressor – to exchange heat from one place to another with amazing efficiency.Radiant floor heating is a trending solution to many standard heating problems. While electric resistance heating is the cheapest and most direct way to heat a building with electricity, it is incredibly inefficient. Since the Living Building Challenge requires all of the energy used at the Bullitt Center to be generated onsite, it was critical to use an energy efficient heating and cooling system. As a result, any “heat pollution” from the wells dissipate within approximately 12 inches. The geothermal well field is under the west side of the building, in an area with a constant lens of groundwater moving slowly toward Puget Sound. In this sense, the ground is used as a “battery” for heat. In the summer, the system can be run in reverse, restoring this heat back into the ground. In the winter, the system removes heat from the ground. When heating the building, the glycol mixture absorbs the ground’s warmth, before it is pumped back up and run through heat pumps in the mechanical room that warm 53 ° F fluid into 90 ° F fluid. This ground-source heat pump uses a closed-loop tube containing a mixture of water and glycol that receives and gives off heat quickly to the surrounding soil and groundwater, which remains at a constant temperature of 53 degrees F. The source of the heat for the radiant system actually starts 400 feet below the Bullitt Center, where twenty six geo-thermal wells dive 400 feet below the building. Inside the tubes, a special mix of water and glycol run quickly, warming or cooling the concrete slab, which efficiently radiates into the occupied spaces. Formally known as “cross-linked polyethylene”, the tubes are commonly called PEX. The Bullitt Center is heated (and cooled) by a dense system of veins, or hydronic radiant tubing that coils a few inches beneath the concrete overlay of each floor. The baseline ground temperature is 53 degrees.26 closed-loop wells take a mixture of water and glycol 400 feet down into the earth.Radiant Heat Spaces are heated with warm water circulated in tubes embedded in concrete floor plates.
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