Allen@massrha.com

Chris Maderia

I read your thread and printed out you layout and you have the outlook for possible major potential problems. Now I only did the living room and based on the information you gave, there is NO WAY that you can heat this room in radiant without some form of supplemental heat. Whomever designed this for you should be ashamed. For starters you need (in round numbers) 10,000 btus to heat the room. Now, you only have 179 sqft to work with in this floor. That means you would have to give the floor 56 btu's per sq foot in order to adequately heat the space. This is not happening. So before you go any further, STOP RAISING THE WATER TEMPS it's not going to work as a permanent solution. The only thing that this will cause is for you to cook this floor. See your floor RV Value is 1.7 which is a little above the R-Value for the average floor. Now will additional plates help? They may, but not enough to heat the space. I would look at leaving what you have in the floor as floor warming and putting in some form of supplemental heat to take care of those real cold days. Another much easier solution would be to have insulation blown into the walls and I can tell you that this will end all of your problems.

Here is a simple little formula that may help you.

BTU's sqft = Ti-To divided by R-Value

Ti= Temperature Indoor
To= Temperature Outdoor

So if you have 135 degree water (Ti)running through your tubing and you have a 74 degree surface temp (To) and your floor has a R-Value of 1.7 than you would be delivering 36 Btu's per sq foot. This would only give you in your case
6,444 btu's and you need 10,000.

The only way you could heat this room with your current conditions would be to run 180 degree water through your system and this would give you a floor surface temp of 80 degrees. Which depending on which radiant manufacturer you listen to is to high of a surface temp for hardwood floors never mine that running 180 degree water is not recommended.

What would I do in this case. Chaulk this experience up, never use that Vermont Radiant Wanna Be and most importantly take care of my customer in anyway that I can. Nothing has hurt the radiant industry more than bad designs and bad installations.