tedlovesjeeps71 wrote:You should lay radiant tubing in the floor before it's poured. Even if it's a few years before you can make the system functional, having a radiant heated garage floor is the cats meow. Not very expensive for the tubing and only a little effort to lay it down.
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I'm glad you brought that up. I would love to be able to do that. Aside from saving up to pay cash for the floor, another reason it's been so long in getting concrete is researching various forms of radiant heating. Geothermal, hot water tanks, electricity- you name it, I've looked in to it.
What I've found is that to do it right, I'd have to dig down another 3-5 inches, lay down insulated barriers to direct the heat up toward the concrete, and without geothermal energy, I'd need 3-4 tanks and several pumps to keep the temperature at about a constant 60 degrees. Geothermal- digging, not drilling, requires a rather large area to be dug up for the tubes. To have that done is roughly 40,000 and up depending on the size of the space you wanted to heat.
While it can be done and some materials are cheaper, I don't have the space to dig up that much of my yard for the tubes for the transfer of the geo heat, and I do not have the space to hold the tanks and pumps necessary to pull it off.
I've read up on cabins off the grid using hot water tanks for radiant heating, but those cabins are pretty small. I've also seen single, and two car garages use water heaters for radiant heating, but I've got just over twice the square footage, and 1.5 x the height. So just based on volume, any system would have to be at least twice the size. I am pretty much In-between a rock and a hard place.
I think I over insulated my shop: r-30 in the ceilings with foam backed r-7 instead of sheet rock for support. R-21 in the walls, and in-between the purlins, I stuck aluminum backed R-8. It's a three tab roof, house wrapped and tar papered exterior over OSB, then sided it. So, my hope is that when I finally get the floor done, I can use the existing pellet stove to make it tolerable in the winter! Haha.
All in all, I'd love to use radiate heat. But I don't think I could pull it off economically.
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