I talk to people on a daily basis about radiant heating and radiant cooling systems. Many people have a fairly good grasp on the basics of radiant. Some even think if you load up a joist bay with as much tubing as you can stuff in, it will work. Maybe yes, maybe no. Having been in the consulting business prior to taking my position with the Radiant Professionals Alliance, I saw many jobs where the physical plant and the distribution systems didn’t have parity. Think of it as driving a tack with a sledge hammer, or driving a railroad spike with a tack hammer. In either case, there will be problems. I’d like to go over some of these problems, expand your horizons, increase your knowledge and teach you to become a recognized expert in your field.
Heat loss calculation, what’s a heat loss calculation? It is a well-known fact radiant floors have a limitation of 30 Btu per sq. ft. per hr. output capacity. So it reasons, if that is the limit, then the easy thing to do would be to take the square footage of the building we are putting the tubing into and multiply it by 30, which tells us how big the boiler needs to be — nothing could be further from the truth.