The beauty of radiant heat is that it heats people and objects, instead of the air. Water is far more dense than air, so greater efficiency is acheived using water as a heat transfer medium instead of air. Your thermostat may be set lower while you feel warmer, resulting in reduced energy use while experiencing superior thermal comfort.

When properly designed and installed, radiant floor heating is a remarkably comfortable and energy-efficient way to heat your home. Radiant floor heating is suited nicely to renewable energy technologies such as solar-thermal and geothermal because lower water temperatures are necessary to deliver thermal comfort. These lower water temperatures are more efficiently acheived using solar-thermal and geothermal equipment. Lower water temperatures also result in reduced system heat losses. The less heat loss there is, generally the lower the energy usage, and hence the lower the cost of operation.

Informed radiant heating system design is critical in order to optimize thermal comfort and energy economy and to ensure the viability of a renewable energy platform.

Typically plumbing contractors are used to utilizing gas boilers and rely solely on their materials suppliers to estimate the radiant system size and materials required. Unfortunately, this bias results in overspecified systems, higher material costs, and higher cost of operation long term.

Conversely, Radiance and its participating EPNetwork contractors place a high value on precise engineered design of its radiant heating systems, ensuring that the heating system is not too large, and not too small, but just right. Such precision is crucial to systems that reliably utilize renewable energy technologies.