What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Installing a Radiant Wall Heating System in Your Home?
While radiant heating is most often associated with underfloor heating, the pipes that carry hot water throughout the radiant heating system can also be installed in your walls. By installing the hot water tubes just behind the drywall and insulating them to keep heat in, a radiant wall heating system is able to rapidly heat up your walls and transmit that heat across an entire room. To find out more about the advantages and disadvantages of installing a radiant wall heating system compared to radiant floor heating, read on.
Advantages of Radiant Wall Heating
The main advantage of installing radiant heating in your walls rather than under the floor is that radiant wall heating is much easier to install in existing homes. Installing radiant floor heating requires removing your existing floor in order to make space for the plastic tubes that carry the hot water. When you install radiant wall heating, you only need to cut holes in the drywall, and these holes can be easily patched. This makes radiant wall heating a less expensive option since there's no need to pay for the cost of removing and replacing one of your floors.
Another advantage of radiant wall heating is that it can heat up a room more quickly than radiant floor heating. The water in a radiant wall heating system can be kept at a higher temperature than the water in a radiant floor heating system — high water temperatures in a radiant floor heating system would make your floor too uncomfortably hot to walk on. In addition, drywall is very light and heats up quickly, which means that it will start transmitting heat into the room shortly after your radiant wall heating system turns on.
Disadvantages of Radiant Wall Heating
The main disadvantage of a radiant wall heating system is that it increases the risk of your home suffering from water damage. When you have a radiant wall heating system installed, you need to take pictures of where all the tubes in the wall are located. If you're hanging a picture on the wall or installing a mounting bracket for a flat-screen television, you need to make sure that you avoid accidentally piercing the tubes. Radiant floor heating, in comparison, carries less risk of causing water damage to your home due to the fact that the tubes are securely located underneath your flooring.
As long as you're careful to not accidentally damage the tubing when penetrating the drywall in your home, radiant wall heating is an excellent option to keep your whole home comfortably warm. You also have the option of installing radiant wall heating only in certain rooms (like a chilly bedroom) to act as an extra source of heat during the coldest days of the year. If you think that radiant wall heating would be a good choice for your home, contact heating system installation companies in your area and find one that has experience working with radiant heating systems.