<!--[if gte mso 9]> I am juggling a few different heating scenarios and am not sure exactly what to do.

We are purchasing a house (primary residence) in 2 months.  The previous owners had enormous dogs which destroyed the flooring, with piss I imagine.  The floors were ripped up and the entire first floor is stripped down to the slab.  Yup. No basement. One big cold slab.

So, here I have a fresh palette to work with (if you don't mind the lingering stink of Big Dog pee).

The house is 30 years old, 2300 sq feet, gets a lot of southern exposure, and has hydronic baseboard (again, dog pee has rusted the radiator covers pretty good – who were these people, I mean, really?).   The oil furnace is kaput, btw.

So here are my options:

Option A: Electric radiant with a wood stove and engineered hardwood floors/ tile:
(Cutting out the baseboard)

The Positive:

- I can zone every room.  By installing a wood stove in the center of the house, all the other rooms will accommodate the movement of heat (turning on at the margins where the wood heat is not reaching) Some zones would not need to go on at all.  Every room could be a minimum of 70 degrees.

-Repairs can be localized

-If the apocalypse happened, I have the wood stove to heat the house, albeit not ideally.

The Negative:

Electric is not a good selling point for resale.

Electric Bills can be super high.

Whole-house electric radiant is not heard of.  All my contractor friends think I am nuts. “Keep it in the kitchens and bathrooms” they say.  “You are a jerk” I say….  I have less contractor friends now than I used to. 

 

Option B: Hydronic Radiant with an outdoor wood furnace/ oil furnace backup.

(Converting the baseboard to hydronic radiant).

The Positive: 

-Energy independence.  I have a lot of wood on the property.

-Cleaner that putting a wood stove in the house

 

The negative. 

-I can’t control the zones.  The first floor is going to heat however it does.  If one area is too hot or cold, well  tough.  That’s the way it is.  No adjusting.

-Feeding the furnace is a lot of work.

-Having to pour more new concrete for hydronic than electric (thicker tubes)

-A leak could be disastrous.

-If the apocalypse happened, I can’t run the circulator (no electricity) and am up shit’s creek.   It could happen... you laugh now.....

 

As I am writing, it seems to me that the electric might be the best bet. But I’m no engineer or mathemagician.

How well does radiant heat go through engineered hardwood?

I don’t know the answers and don’t have any good insight here…

Is this all just stupid?  Should I just get a new high efficiency oil furnace and clean up the baseboards and stick with what I have?

 

My head hurts.

<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Wendell we will need some More Questions answered before we can give good advice:
Location  zip code?
Is there insulation under the slab? if so what and how much?
Manual J calcs? 
Will you want AC also?
Average cost per KWH for electricity?
Average Cost per gallon of oil?
Cheers,
Eric

Consider that a wood boiler + hydronic (of any kind) makes it much easier to store heat (in a tank). So more even temperatures and less frequent loading. Consider mini-splits to supplement this.

Rent an ozone generator. It will take out the dog odours and kill most bugs and some moulds.

Why can't you zone radiant heat?

The chances of a properly installed radiant floor leaking is less then the tub overflowing.

If you can't run a circulator, you sure can't run all that resistance heating!

Radiant will work with hardwood, keep it below 85º.

Do you have enough room height to put down insulation and pour a thin radiant slab?

Last things first: There is NO FUTURE in heating with heating oil- it will always be more expensive than ductless mini-splits or wood stoves to operate (or at least within the lifecycle of an oil-fired boiler it will be.)  The cost of extracting tight-oil crude establishes the price floor for heating oil, which tracks the crude prices fairly well.  At $100/bbl crude heating oil is about $3.50-4/gallon, but at below $75/bbl tight oil can't be extracted profitably. So unless the world stops using oil for transportation and nobody wants it anymore, heating oil will never go below roughly ($75/$100 x $3.50=) $2.60/gallon, which is more expensive than heating with ductless mini-splits + auxilliary resistance heating.

Electric heating is only expensive when not leveraged by heat pumps, or the rooms are kept at constant temp whether occupied or not.

When used in conjunction with point source heating (either wood stove, or ductless mini-split) installing electric radiant as cove heaters as opposed to radiant floor, ceiling or panel radiators is both cheap to install  and cheap to operator.  Unlike radiant floors & ceilings radiant covers are nearly instant-on, which means you can control it with both occupancy sensors & thermostats (rather than just  thermostats).  With that approach comfort is still pretty good 15 seconds after entering a cold room.  Since it heats the objects in the room (including the humans) before heating the air, it raises the average radiant temperature in the room during the recovery ramp, which is more important to human comfort than air temperature. Putting the cove heater above the largest window tends to work best, since that's usually the side of the room that would otherwise have the lowest radiant temperature- the radiant cove changes that to the highest radiant temp side, so you don't have the hot/cold side contrasts to deal with as it's coming up to temp. It's a bit like standing in front of sunny window in a cool room.  With occupancy sensor control to turn it off when unoccupied, and a thermostat to inhibit operation when the room is already warm enough it sips power compared to other resistance-electricity heating strategies.

Cove heaters w/occupancy sensor control runs ~$250-300 per room, (if done as a DIY) provided you size them fairly closely to the room's 99% outside design temperature heat load.  Don't oversize them by any more than you have to, you don't want it to feel like a broiler that comes on & off in rapid cycles- a slow steady warmup ramp and longer not-as-intense maintenance cycle is better for comfort. A $25-50 occupancy sensor switch like the Leviton ODS15-ID has sufficient capacity for 1800W (6100 BTU/hr)  of 120VAC cove, or 4000W (13,600 BTU/hr) if running at 277VAC, and can be wired in series with a line-voltage thermostat- you're into the controls for only $50-100/room- the rest is the cove heater and the wiring.  If you want to get fancy, a Lutron MS-OP600M dimmer w/occupancy control would let you dial back the intensity to that it has longer on-cycles (but only good for a maximum of 600W/ 2000 BTU/hr room loads.)  For bedrooms you may want to set up a bypass switch for the occupancy sensor &/or use a setback thermostat instead of occupancy control, if the room would otherswise get too cold while sleeping.

Unless there is already insulation under the slab (or at least the slab edge) running a radiant slab is going to be pretty lossy (=expensive, if using fixed residential rate power, in most locations.)  With an uninsulated slab, in rooms where a constant temp is desirable, radiant ceiling would be both more responsive and use less power.

Outdoor wood boilers have a fairly significant air pollution issue. (In my state you can be shut down by any neighbor with a house within 500' of your wood boiler if they object, and you're not automatically grandfathered in if you were there before they moved in.)

The limitations of radiant with engineered flooring would be the rated temperature of the flooring.  The temp it actually needs to run is a function of the heat load of that zone, and the amount of square feet of radiant floor you're dealing with.

Getting to the most-reasonable solution starts with a room-by-room heat load calculation, based on the construction of the house AFTER you've fixed up the most obvious insulation & air sealing  shortcomings of the building envelope.

If you take the upfront cost difference between the wood-stove + cove-heaters approach and the full-on wood-boiler/radiant approaches and apply it to rooftop solar (at about $4 watt in my neighborhood, before subsidies are applied) you can probably more than offset the power used by the auxilliary electric heating.

There are pellet boilers available that could use your existing baseboards, but both the equipment and fuel are more expensive than heating a ductless mini-split solution in most markets.

Rent an ozone generator. It will take out the dog odours and kill most bugs and some moulds.

Be very careful with that. Ozone is poison to the human organism, too. If you feel you can't live with the odors and ozone is the ONLY way to get rid of them then go ahead, but I'd air the place out for days before living in it again. Don't breathe the ozone.

I agree. Ozone is great for odor removal, but it's only for unoccupied buildings. Not so clear is if short term use damages other things (like plastics).