Designing Home Heating Systems

Using Warm Water

For most of human history, people enjoyed the heat radiating from a nearby fire. Ben Franklin built a stove with doors that could be closed while people slept. Embers started fires in wooden houses, so closed metal stoves prevented some of the embers from reaching flammable curtains, clothing and combustible construction materials.

Franklin felt safer placing fire in a boiler in a separate building; the boiler sent steam into a radiator inside the home. Boiler water became the expected safe method of heating large public buildings. However, most homeowners could not afford to heat poorly insulated homes with steam or hot water heating systems.

After 1950, many homes were built with oil or gas fired hot air heat. heating professionals learned that room surfaces colder than the skin take heat away from the body. Cold walls draw heat from the air, creating drafts in the room that make occupants wear long sleeves or sweaters.

Air heated rooms felt cold, then too hot, then cold again. People would push the thermostat up to 76F (76 degrees Fahrenheit) in the winter and turn the central cooling down to 68F in the summer. The least expensive type of heating system could only provide inadequate comfort.

Surrounded By Comfort

Near the end of the millenium, building codes required home builders to install more insulation; as a result, smaller heating and cooling systems became affordable. Homeowners could afford to specify walls or floors heated with warm water, and separate cooling systems. The best heating systems cost half the price of an automobile and would not be noticed in the home mortgage

Heating designers place radiation, baseboard, and radiant tubing in exact locations in the room so the warm surfaces send rays of heat directly to the occupants. Baseboard warms the air near the floor, sending warmed air upwards to heat the walls. The warm walls send heat toward the occupants.

The easiest way to place radiant heat in a room is to install baseboard or radiators along the outer walls of the room. Small, low-output baseboard is available that actually looks like boards when placed along the base of the outer walls. If more radiation is needed in the room, the small baseboard extends along some of the interior walls.

Contractors also install tubing above or below the floor (encased in wood or concrete.) The entire floor becomes a warm heating surface that surrounds the room occupants with radiant heat.