adding more heat to living room

nycpa

I have a traditional stream heating system.  Works fine so far.  I wanted to add heating to my finished basement as well as more heat into my living room because the radiator present is more like a bedroom radiator than a larger living room radiator. In order to install a larger radiator, I would have to break the wall, remove studs and restud and sheet rock it since the radiator is built into the wall. I wanted to add a baseboard to the living room since its one consists of making two holes through my wall.  Do you guys think it would be a problem to have the living room baseboards and basement baseboard as one loop?  Also, would I be able to control the two as separate zones or will they be one zone as a whole?  How does the idea sound of getting more heat into the living room?  

Jamie Hall

I would be inclined...

to run the basement as a hydronic loop off the boiler -- several ways to do that.  Assuming you have the capacity.  You could either run hydronic baseboard in the living room (but I'd make it a separate loop -- unless you are real lucky, you won't want the same amount of heat in the living room as the basement!) or put in a bigger steam radiator -- and there seems to me the decision would be largely how much hassle is which option.

jpf321

built into the wall?

is it a convector of some sort? or a cast iron rad that is recessed? do you have a picture? are there drapes or furniture restricting airflow? has it been vacuumed out recently? if it's a convector of sorts, it may not be putting out enough heat due to lack of convection and not necessarily be undersized. picture would help, so may shorter drapes.