Quote:
Originally Posted by buffalobillpatrick
...My new house is not built yet & I am designing it to be very energy efficient. The heat loss calculations look to be about 30K btu / hr at design temperature of 2* F.
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I think that you are making the very same mistake that virtually everyone makes when they consider comfort in a winter home... (including the advice in this thread you have gotten so far) which is that you are already focused on heating a house, rather than retaining heat in that house.
At this stage of the game, since you haven't even built the house yet, you have the opportunity to re-direct the intellectual energy that you now have focused on the heating system, back to the design of the house. 30K BTU/hr @2F is OK, but you can do much, much better.
Every BTU of energy that you can prevent from being lost, is a BTU that you will not have to provide with a mechanical system that
IN ALL CASES will be expensive and require some form of fuel and/or maintenance.
Energy retention is
extremely reliable, it has no moving parts, you will not ever need to make a service call because your insulation broke down in the middle of the night.
I say that you are wasting your time and everyone else's time at this stage, getting ideas on designing a heating system.
You need to go back to the drawing board in your house design.
You should learn all you possibly can about Passive House design, not only the concepts of insulation, and high performance doors and windows, but the actual details of Passive House construction, from the completely insulated foundation and floor, up through the R60 walls and the R100+ roof, and all of the many details that add up to radically reducing infiltration.
As for radiant floors, if your house is properly designed, you will not require them either.
You don't need to build a pretty good twentieth century house with some improvements and a clever mechanical heating system. You have the opportunity before you to build an excellent twenty-first century house that recognizes the realities of resource depletion, and works with the forces of nature to provide you with an attractive, healthy and comfortable home environment.
Best,
-AC_Hacker