Cooling a Home That Has a Radiant Floor Heating System

A home that has a radiant floor heating system will typically have a separate system installed to provide the cooling.

The reason is straightforward: heating is ideally delivered from the ground up.

Radiant floor heating produces room temperatures very close to ideal: 75° at floor level, declining to 68° at eye level, then to 61° at the ceiling.

Ideal Heating Curve Chart

Cooling, contrastingly, is best delivered through ductwork located near the ceiling of a room. Trying to do both functions with one system will render one or the other less effective.

A separate system to deliver just cooling will not be as expensive as a combination heating/cooling system.

The bottom line on cost:

In a home requiring a cooling system, the net cost of getting radiant floor heating will be the cost of the radiant floor heating system, less the amount saved by not having a heating unit on your forced air cooling system.

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