Hot Hot Heat!

Our dear readers may have written us off, but the truth is we have been on hiatus for a while. We've been taking the last many months to recover: the chronic burden of an ongoing renovation wears both the body and soul. Jamie fell ill shortly after we moved in, and we have been focusing on her convalescence.

Still, we have made some little adjustments to the house here and there, which we may recap in time. The main event occurring right now which has brought the blog back to life is that installation is underway for our new radiant floor heating!

We're very excited about this feature; we've been putting it off for a long time because (a) we initially didn't think we would need it (big mistake: winters bring us interior temperatures of 52 degrees!), and (b) it's expensive. But we've passed enough nights too cold for space heaters to warm that we finally pulled the trigger.

Radiant floor heating comes in many forms. Ours is hydronic, meaning it uses hot water tubes as opposed to electrical coils, and is being installed from underneath the subfloor. We purchased the home with this opportunity in mind, since the lower level has completely exposed, tall ceilings.

The tubes run in switchbacks along the joist bays, and special aluminum plates are fixed to the ceiling to more efficiently and evenly conduct the heat through to the floor. Notice the nails in the photo to the right: the guy who installed our flooring used nails that were too long, so they poked through more than an inch below the subfloor. This is common—but still stupid and avoidable—and meant that before installation the workers had to go around and pound down literally thousands of these nails. It was well worth paying them a bit extra to avoid having to do this ourselves.

A heating job like this calls for a good, quality boiler, and that's where a significant part of the expense is—literally many thousands of dollars. Our contractors have installed a Lochinvar Knight on the north wall of the garage, and I believe there will be a manifold controller of some kind that the various water tubes get routed through. This boiler is special too in that we can also add an attachment to supply residential hot water. This might be desirable in the future since having a tankless heater at the far rear of the home does mean a significant wait for hot water to reach the bathroom faucet.

The whole installation process is expected to take about 2 weeks. We can't wait for it to be completed!