It’s funny how things get started sometimes. We had always planned on remodeling our new home, but the start of the remodel was somewhat unplanned. We had just had our first cold day in October, so I decided I would turn on the furnace to make sure it worked properly. While it blew hot air just fine, upon closer inspection I found that the heat ducts were full of nasty old dust and grime. The logical thing to do at this point would be to pay for someone to come clean out your heat ducts… For some reason we found it a good excuse to install radiant heat. Step one was to pull up the carpet, which lead to a series of discoveries that inspired us to rip out all the flooring and the wall between our bedroom and living room. Needless to say it was a big mess. We were able to find a used high end boiler used for about 1/4th the price of a new one, and installed all the radiant tubing in the floors ourselves. It took over two months until we had it back together again and finally had heat in our home about two weeks before Christmas. There were a couple of nights that it got down to 50 degree’s inside. We were happy to have heat, and in the end it cost us around $5,000 and a lot of hard work. The good news was that the system was way oversized so there would hardly be any expense when we got around to doing our addition.

We installed about 400 square feet of temporary flooring over the radiant. We used 4′ x 4′ squares of 3/4″ plywood that I got from a local lumberyards scrap pile. There was a variety of woods from oak to birch and the finished cost was around $0.50 a square foot. If we had sealed it properly we would have been tempted to just leave it down, as it looked pretty good. Especially for the price.

Lessons learned:

1. Installing the tubing for radiant heat is easy. Installing the boiler and all the controls, leave it to the pro’s.

2. Buying used can save a huge amount of money. In the case of our boiler we saved about $2,000. Almost half of the whole cost.

3. This one is a recurring theme: Using common materials in a creative manner (like our floors) can save a ton of money, and create a unique look.

For all the details on the radiant check this old post.