Radiant Cooling

Jerry Valentine

Does anyone out there have any experience with radiant cooling? I'm trying to design a heating and cooling system using either a reverse cycle chiller with open or closed loops or a packaged air to water heat pump (?) with storage tanks. Building is a garage that will be used for "vintage car" storage, so climate control is essential -- I want 70 deg in the heating season, 75 deg in the cooling season and I want to maintain 25 to 30% R.H. I've been playing with this for a few days and realize that it would be good to see if anyone else has any ideas. Right now I'm leaning towards piping in the floor for both heating and cooling and adding a ducted system to assist in the control of humidity and possibly a DOAS. The garage will be divided into 3 different areas and only the car storage area has the low RH requirement. The other areas I'd still like to cool radiantly and I will still have to keep condensation from forming. Any comments will be appreciated.

Thanks

Unknown

I believe,

I have just installed a radiant cooling system but having not used it to cool yet I'm not really sure.

Do a search on me and I believe you can dig up my recent posts on it. Sounds like you're on the right track to me. I used HV Unicos with chilled water for dehumidifying. Achieving 25-30% is probably not doable with chilled water so I'm thinking you'll need some type of refrigerant based dehumidifier in addition to the CW to get there.

here's a link

http://forums.invision.net/Thread.cfm?CFApp=2&&Message_ID=441325&_#Message441325

Bob Gagnon plumbing and heating

I use well water only- Go Green!

It's 56 degrees and I send it through a fan coil unit first to cool the air and remove humidity, then I send the cold water through my radiant system, it cools my house to the core and the comfort level is awesome! I have been running it for 8 summers now and no sign of moisture. There is a diagram and better explaination on my website at www.BobGagnon.com

Thanks, Bob Gagnon

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Gordy

Bob

Have you experimented with just using the water through the fan coils only? Just wondering how much the radiant role really plays if the fan coils are sized big enough for your house.

System sounds green, and sweet though. The fan coils removing the humidity is key with that cold of water. I doubt you could use that cool of water through just straight radiant with out moisture associated problems. I seem to recall 65*.

Gordy

Mike Dunn

what about

passive cooling with the radiant.

Michel Sales Agency in St. Paul MN buried alot of 3/4" pex 4 feet underground below their warehouse floor and use a circulator to move the water through the office floors then through the recharge loop under the warehouse floor. They have regular AC to keep the humidity in check. They've been using this system for several years.

You could call them and ask for Harold Bruner to explain it better.

Mike Dunn

Bob Gagnon plumbing and heating

GKaskre

The floors provide deep down cooling and provide the deep down radiant cooling effect. If you shut off the radiant panels you really feel a big difference. And you are right about cooling the floors only, I tried cooling the floors only first and it wasn't enough cooling, and the floors showed signs of moisture. I think you are also right about sizing the fan coil bigger and skipping the radiant panels, but I already had the radiant heating, if someone started off fresh the larger coil it would be a lot cheaper than radiant, but not as comfortable.

Thanks, Bob Gagnon

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