staple up radiant heat

Max Tower

Hello,

I have a 1957 house with terribly inefficient baseboard heaters. I am considering installing a "staple up" radiant floor heating system. Has anyone accomplished this successfully? Will the heat be enough to warm my house through my subfloor and hardwood floors?

Any particular recommended suppliers?

Does anyone have a radiant heated house near Portland, OR, I can come look at?



Max

Hydronx_2

staple up

Staple up will work fine, but you should put it in with aluminum heat transfer plates for the best efficiency. Check out "Thermofin" manufactured by Radiant Engineering. http://radiantengineering.com/Links/Finhomepg.html

jerry scharf_2

can't say

Max,

You need to do a heat loss calculation and see what would be required in terms of heat delivery in each room. Then you can work on a design that delivers that to the rooms. The design includes the boiler, piping/fins, insulation and controls. Without doing this, you're just rolling the dice whether the system will work when it's all done.

jerry

ed_19

I am in the process of finishing a project like you describe. I recently moved into a ranch style, built in the 50’s. We have installed several radiant projects in the area, including staple up and everyone has been happy with the results, so I figured I would try it with my own house. The house is about 1600 sq ft. with a full basement, which made the install easy. I did my heat loss calc. and had 2 suppliers do one as well.
Due to the budget I chose Zurn products over Watts. The Watts supplier was really pushing the onyx, but I chose the pex as a matter of personal preference and a little research, and cost. Pex-al-pex would also be worth a look. I also thought about using copper tubing, but I didn’t. I did install plates, but not in the entire system. I used plates along all of the exterior walls and in any room that has or will have tile. I used plastic staples and pneumatic staple gun made for pex tubing to attach to the sub-floor where I didn’t use plates. I also used jada clips (orange plastic clips for pex) at the end of each bay just to hold the tubing during the install. The supplier recommended the jada clips for the whole project but they do not work. When the tubing expands it pops out of the clips. This has happened on a previous job as well. If I had to do it over again I would use plates as my hangers as the staples do cause some noise during expansion and contraction.
I used an A and B type spray foam to insulate the perimeter of the joist space. At this point I am still insulating the joist spaces with R-19 fiberglass batt insulation. The system has been running since the beginning of December and seems to be working great. This is a remodel and my wife and I are living there at the same time so I haven’t finished the whole house yet. There are a couple of rooms that have concrete floors that haven’t been attended to yet, but for the most part the system works well. It even kept up during the last cold snap we had (upstate NY).
The system is controlled with a tekmar radiant control I think #631. I would really like to finish the insulation so the system is complete, but I have a lot of cleaning up to do first (existing pipes and wires). If you have any questions let me know. I was also happy to get rid of all of those ugly baseboards, I counted 4 different styles form 1 ¼” commercial stuff to ¾” residential. Good Luck