true price of in floor heating?

[WTA]

I just found a company online that looks good. I filled out their online quote form and am waiting for a response. I'm hoping to use both water heaters in an open system and have 6 different and separately controlled zones. We have a big horseshoe shaped hallway around one end of hte house with a bedroom and bathroom in the middle of that. The last owner took the doors out of the hallway way back in the 70's but I'm going to seal it back off with weathertight interior doors to better control the zones. They have modified so much here over the years that I have my work cut out for me optimizing it for the wood floors and sealing things up. We pulled up two layers of deep shag carpet to get to the wood. Needless to say there is a 2-4 inch gap under all of the interior doors now. Some people are just lazy! I'm going to do it right though.

The parts quotes I looked at on that site made it look like our entire system should be under 5,000 bucks. I can live with that. That's only 4 months worth of propane for heating this big old house!

 

[RonMar]

I have seen a few systems for under-floor retrofit installations. Most use a radiating plate that the pipe snaps or is slid into. This plate is then pushed right up against the subfloor. As mentioned, you need to insulate real well underneath to keep from heating the crawl space. With the cost of good insulation these days, that will be a major player in the bottom line of a system like this.

Touring a solar site last year I came across a system that is installed on top of the floor. It starts with high density foam sheets layed down on the subfloor to provide the insulation. These sheets have the "ditches" milled to accomidate the PEX tube and radiator plates which set flat on top of the foam. The flooring goes on top of this, but it must not use nails, so carpet or engineered flooring is required to top it off. It also adds about 2 inches to the floor height.

 

[Red55]

It also adds about 2 inches to the floor height.

WTA -There you go back to your old floor height! BTW on the floor retrofit is the most effecient but most people don't want to redo floors. Also watch those beams if their "old" growth could take quite a bit of drilling to get thru. A friend of mine when thru several drills, drilling for his radiant floor thru oak beams. He loved Home depot return policy. -Ed