Add radiant to a geo setup?
We're building a new 5000 sqft house. It'll have 3 zones, using three 400ft vertical wells. We're in Maryland, just outside of DC. It's going to be foam insulated. I don't know that it qualifies as "super insulated" but it's more than would typically be done with batts. The old brick-on-block literally had NO insulation in the walls, just an air gap from 1" furring strips!
I don't have all the specifics of the setup. It's a Water Furnace system. I believe it does not currently include a desuperheater.
My question is whether it's worthwhile to add a radiant floor setup in addition to the forced air ducting. All of the flooring likely to have floor radiant would be wood floor. The whole house will be foam insulated and conditioned. So there won't be any places with a crawl space under them.
I'm wondering if it'd be worthwhile adding some radiant loops under certain parts of the house. Like the walkable areas under the kitchen, 1st floor hallways and an office. My thought here is to just take the chill off the floor, not heat the whole space. We get a pretty dramatic range of temperature changes around here, especially at the change of seasons. So there are times where it's nice to have the floor warmed up a little without heating the whole area.
We've had electric underfloor in bathrooms and are budgeted to have that again in the master and children's bath. Those are on the 2nd floor so I'm not sure how viable it would be to integrate them along with the 1st floor. But the time to warm them up would likely be pretty close to each other. Each floor has it's own zone.
Budget today might not allow for adding a whole radiant setup. But before I go having drywall put up underneath these areas I'm debating whether it'd be worth putting up some underfloor tubing and panels. And as budgets allow later tying them back into the geo setup.
Yeah, it doesn't always seem like it costs much to "do it all" now, but the numbers pile up. At some point adding a few thousand here and there starts cutting into the budget for other materials. But I'm willing to consider some infrastructure things now, instead of paying money to rip things apart later. As in, better to put in some tubing now vs paying to demo, replace and repaint the whole drywall ceiling to do it later.
The good part is I've got blank slate to work with here. Nothing's in yet and my hope is if something like this is worthwhile to make sure the mechanical room is sized and laid out to allow for additions like this or changes later.
