Pros and Cons of Radiant-Floor Panels in Heating or Cooling Your Home

Posted on: 14 October 2016

Radiant floor panels are pieces of aluminum backed by copper tubing that provide the electricity or water supply required for the heating. The panels offer a few essential pros and cons when compared to a traditional HVAC unit. Weighing those factors can help you determine whether radiant panels are the right choice for your situation.

Here are a few of the pros and cons for radiant floor panels. Need more advice after reading? Talk to a heating and air-conditioning services company such as Staley Mechanicals for more information.

Pro: Easily Installed, Low Footprint

Radiant floor panels aren't difficult to install, but installation might require you to temporarily remove some of your flooring to position the panels. If you are in the middle of remodeling a room and the floor is already up, that is the perfect time to install the panels with little effort.

Taking up the floor might seem like a con, but if your home lacks existing ductwork for a central furnace, having removed flooring will seem much easier to work with than going into the walls to put in those ducts. And the small, thin size of the radiant heaters means that the floor panels can fit easily under most types of flooring.

Pro: Energy Efficient

Radiant panels offer an energy-efficiency improvement on a central system because the heater has a much simpler functionality and doesn't run as often. The floor panels also have the advantage that heat naturally rises, so the electricity or water won't need to work as hard to put out the same amount of heat in a room.

Central furnaces rely on a motorized blower fan to push out the hot air in the vents throughout your home. The blower fan relies on electricity and has to run constantly with the furnace, and not every vent is positioned in the best way to allow the heat to rise naturally.

Con: Heats a Smaller Area

The radiant-heating panels direct the heat straight upward rather than dispersing the air with a fan, and that means the floor panels do have a more limited range. The floor panels would be perfect in an extra-cold bathroom, for example, but they won't prove as prudent of an option if you need to heat an entire house with thousands of square feet.

If you need to heat a whole house well, you should invest in a central HVAC unit. The installation and running costs will prove worth having a comfortable temperature throughout your house in the winter months.

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