Heating Our House

Between the quote we got in the spring of 2021 and the fall when we were ready to have our heat system installed the price jumped several thousand dollars. Talk about a budgeting nightmare.

The house had in-floor vents for forced air heating, and came with the duct work. All we needed was a new furnace and someone to install the duct-work. Trying to get a hold of a technician was difficult. Those technicians that did answer their phones or return calls were no longer doing duct-work. We were able to get a propane tank on our land and have it filled with a line run to the house, but by mid-October we still didn’t have heat. In fact, in August of 2022 we still didn’t have our heat fully connected.

I think it was November of 2021 when we finally ordered the parts we needed to run radiant heat in the house and our plan was to install it ourselves with some help from my dad. My parents have renovated a 100+ year old house just a few years before and my dad was familiar with radiant heat systems. Below is Seth running flex-lines through the house for our heat system. And above is one of three adorable cast iron radiators that will heat our house. The kitchen, living room, and dining room will all get a cast iron radiator. All other spaces will have baseboard heaters. The cast iron was one way that we could bring back a touch of the time period the house is from into our modern renovation.

I’ve been telling Seth this house is his bachelor’s in construction. He’s learned so much, and that’s most of the reason why we’re still not finished with our “expensive art project,” as he calls it.

Below you can see the lines run from the basement into the bedrooms upstairs. Another reason our project is behind: we decided to keep the ship-lap. And the insulation behind it. So that meant getting creative with the plumbing and electrical, as well.

The house we’ve been staying in while working on our farmhouse has in-floor electric heat and so we knew we liked radiant heat. We weren’t looking forward to a forced air system after living in the camper and dealing with condensation issues. While the camper is a much smaller space, we still anticipated moisture being a problem in our house as well. We had planned on putting in a wood stove to help heat the house and balance out the moisture of the forced air system, but now our wood stove may just be for looks. Above is the platform it will eventually go on.

Now that our floors are sanded and sealed and our walls are either sealed or painted, the next project was installing the radiators and baseboards and then tying the system together at the water heater. The boiler/water heater for our heat system is also the water heater for our house and it’s nice to only have to worry about one unit. Seth had to make a trip in September 2022 to Hartsfield to take care of that before a cold snap hit. We had to make several trips up north before the end of the year as that is when our house absolutely had to be done. At least the upstairs. The basement will just have to wait at this point.

Here’s our utility room with the three zones of heat in the process of being installed. The basement, bedrooms, and main level are all separate zones. Now that the heat has been running for a few months, it’s pretty efficient and we’ve been able to fine-tune a little bit. We have, however, noticed that we get a draft in the living room and dining room. While we initially thought this was because of the shiplap, the bedrooms upstairs aren’t as drafty. It’s warm enough to be comfortable, we’ve just noticed that it’s a little cooler than the rest of the house. I’m suspecting the windows or the insulation at this point.

We’re planning on replacing all the windows in a couple years, and then eventually re-siding the house. When we re-side it we’ll add another layer of insulation from the outside. That didn’t help us with the living room this winter, though.

Here’s a baseboard radiator in the utility room. We thought the boiler would be warm enough to keep all the pipes and well pump from freezing, but because of how cold it is here, we thought we’d play it safe and add additional heat. It’s a little rougher than the radiator placement upstairs, where the walls and trim cover the lines, but it gets the job done.

It’s been quite the adventure to get heat in our house, and in December of 2022 we ran out of propane in the house before we came back for Christmas. So, even while the house was “done” in November, we weren’t able to stay at Hartsfield as we had planned. However, the damage was minimal (in terms of how bad it could have been) and we’ll be back up in the Spring to fix the radiator that broke so we can have heat again. For now, the well pump has heat tape and the utility room has a small electric heater to keep the well pump and boiler from freezing.