Infrared heaters

If you are going to be in this house forever, I'd give serious thought of changing to infloor radiant heat. Why wait until "If I had to do it again". Ceramic tile has two problems. One, if you drop something, that something breaks, and two, it's darn cold. The only way I know of to make it warm is radiant tubes.

Freddy wrote:If you are going to be in this house forever, I'd give serious thought of changing to infloor radiant heat. Why wait until "If I had to do it again"?

Because "forever" for me is not nearly as long as it used to be, and that distorts the payback-period calculations.

I said that, "if I ever build again" in jest! It will never happen!

Running in floor heating won't happen either! With what is going on these days I seriously doubt any of us could look into their crystal ball and determine which energy source will be best to install now for 40 years from now. My bet would be a nuclear reactor in my basement!

I suspect the Greenies will be mixing our coal with corn and maybee pine cones or some other trash for half the BTUs at four times the price and calling it good! Oh wait, I did forget that coal will likely be outlawed in the near future. The mix will probably be corn, pine cones and some middle east BS that we can't afford!

The question was, " how to warm my floors" and answers that require multi thousand dollar fixes just will not work. I bought some nice slippers, LL Bean, but on sale. Infrared heaters just won't do the job any less expensive.

Some rugs would help a lot especially on the bathroom floor.

Gary L wrote:I said that, "if I ever build again" in jest! It will never happen!

Running in floor heating won't happen either! With what is going on these days I seriously doubt any of us could look into their crystal ball and determine which energy source will be best to install now for 40 years from now. My bet would be a nuclear reactor in my basement!

you don't have to wait 40 years , Toshiba makes a micro reactor, no bigger than the size of a coal bin, it runs on Thorium, and if I remember right, you can get thorium from burning coal.

But those reactors are not approved to be used or imported to USA, the cost of producing a KWH is under 5 cents, and they can run a small community of 500 homes or so, they have been produced about 5 years ago or so !

CoalUserWannabe wrote:

Gary L wrote:I said that, "if I ever build again" in jest! It will never happen!

Running in floor heating won't happen either! With what is going on these days I seriously doubt any of us could look into their crystal ball and determine which energy source will be best to install now for 40 years from now. My bet would be a nuclear reactor in my basement!

you don't have to wait 40 years , Toshiba makes a micro reactor, no bigger than the size of a coal bin, it runs on Thorium, and if I remember right, you can get thorium from burning coal.

But those reactors are not approved to be used or imported to USA, the cost of producing a KWH is under 5 cents, and they can run a small community of 500 homes or so, they have been produced about 5 years ago or so !

More info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... efer=japan

I'm not really sure Japanese reactors will be a hot seller after that last debacle. And good luck recovering thorium from your burned coal.

I gather that you don't have direct access from the basement to outside? If you have even a basement window you could rig up a coal chute and abuild a wooden bin to hold it. That at least eliminates moving coal in. Even a small insert type coal burner would make a big difference in floor temps.

Not sure of how to get ashes out, you could use a large steel trash can with a lid to hold the daily load until it was full enough to carry out of the basement.

I built this house with an areaway in the garage so I could bring wood or coal in and ashes out. Got the Harman in with a chain hoist.

Electric IR heaters are incredibly expensive to run, period.

Ops