Radiant Ceiling (worthwhile?)

Tom Giedraitis

A colleague of mine has asked that I ask an opinion of the experts here. He's trying to decide if it would be worthwile to do radiant ceilings and get some advice on install methods.

He's been building a pretty large addition on his house which includes one huge room of about 1,000 sf with 9 ft ceilings and alot of windows which come very low to the floor. He's been in construction all his life and has done all the work himself on nights, weekends, vacations, etc.

The room is completely framed, and enclosed, but none of the drywall is done yet.

He had never planned on using radiant, but like me has learned alot about it in the last year and now wishes he had planned for it. He has only about an 18" crawl space and the thought of crawling on his back to install plates and tubing made him ask if radiant ceilings would be a viable/effective option and what the recommended method would be.

Any thoughts?

GMcD

Radiant ceilings

Radiant ceilings are a fine idea. There are a number of options- low temperature "whole ceiling" surface radiant, or integrated aluminum radiant panels running with high temperature heating water. The choice may depend on the desired ceiling finishes and perimeter heat losses. There won't be a lot of thermal mass involved, so the controls could be conventional thermostats and solenoid valves. There is a product being marketted out of Chicago - the Karo capillary tubes, which are a good solution to the "whole ceiling" radiant approach, or go to Twa/Sterling/Airtex aluminum radiant panels integrated into the ceiling. Some weblinks: http://www.twapanels.ca/ and http://www.naturalcooling.com/ Another method would be to lay out 1/2" PEX on the back of the ceiling on 6" centres, and plop some good solid insulation on top of that to drive the heat down and calculate the temperature needed based on the room heat losses. Not quite as even a heat distribution compared to capillary tubes, but close, and you can still use some fairly low water temperatures to get effective heating. Cheers, G.