Idle observation.

[ysobelle]

I'm watching "House Lift" on Discovery Home. A family's getting a huge addition to their house, including a new master bedroom and bath. They're all raving about "new" radiant heat, which is tubes run directly aganst the underside of the floor, through which hot water or hot air is forced.

Funny. When the Romans did it, they called it a hypocaust.

Comments

[bronxelf-ag001.livejournal.com]

And when the installers, who are getting paid almost nothing for these shows, screw it up, it's called "really expensive to fix."

I love radiant heat-- but it's entirely dependent on the competence of the person installing it and the quality of the system.

/professional geekery.

[ysobelle.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. One tiny leak, one blockage somewhere, and you're fucked-- floor, ceiling, or both.

I seem to remember seeing a Roman system that used water instead of air; now I can't find any references to it. You know what I'm talking about?

[bronxelf-ag001.livejournal.com]

Most modern systems use water. It's actually easier than forced warm air in this case (you're not required to have central air if you use water.)

But no idea what the Romans used.

[fondor.livejournal.com]

Typically it was a hot air system. Actually this same system is used in Mt Vernon at George Washington's home to warm the floor of the herbarium. Unfortunately with both of these systems, there isn't a heat exchanger so there is a great threat of CO poisoning and carbon buildup. This can result in most wonderful conflagrations (the word of the day) and death. Depending on where you were in the roman empire they did use heated water piped through as well, but most of those had leakage issues.

Well, sort of...

[deathwardegg.livejournal.com]

I first learned about hypocausts when I was in Bath, England, U.K. Oddly, that was the first I'd heard about them (oddly because I went to a "classics" grade school where we studied Latin and the Romans).

Well, perhaps not that odd, since the word is actually from the Greek.

But a hypocaust is dramatically different than "radiant heating" in the sense that the human-occupied area was a separate, distinct floor, which was fully supported by the central stacks of tiles which retained and distributed the heat (the hypocaust per se).

I certainly wouldn't dispute that the reliability of a modern equivalent of such a system (which does now exclusively use "water" (actually a mix of glycols and water)) - might be subject to the competence of the person(s) installing it. However, the sealed system installed in my parents' house in Harrisburg, PA, USA - which was built in 1928 - has never failed, even after the catastrophic Susquehanna flood of 1978 caused one floor of the structure to collapse! They don't make 'em like they used to.

When I installed radiant floor heating in the bathroom of my apartment in Santa Cruz, I made damn sure the installation would last forever. I swore that I (or my grandchildren or inheritors) would never have to jackhammer up the $38/square foot tile, which I hand-filed to the exact fit, to fix anything. I suppose that kind of attention to detail is rare nowdays, but I believe in leaving every place I've been, a little bit better.