i want to know if heating a house with basebooard heat will be more or less expensive than forced hot air.---both ran by natural gas power. i dont care about allergies.
It basically takes the same amount of Btus to heat your house to a comfotable level. HVAC companies use whats called a heat loss calculation to decide what size equipment it will require to heat your house. The same calculation is used for forced-air as for a boiler. So, if you're burning natural gas to create those Btus in your house, whether with a furnace or a boiler it doesn't really matter to the gas company-especially now that both types of equpment offer high-efficiency options. One thing you might consider is the up-front cost. Sometimes boiler systems cost more for a new system than forced-air systems, and if you buy a boiler- you still have to plan on air condtioning the house, which is done with forced-air also. Comfort is another (and final) factor to consider- some people prefer the way a boiler system heats as opposed to a forced-air system.
jwtindale is basically correct. If you have the upfront dough to install a hot water boiler with your A/C system, definitely go for it. You won't regret it. Hot water heating, especially baseboard, is extremely quiet, comfortable, very versatile (you can zone individual rooms, floors, or sections of the house and have separate thermostats in each zone/ room so you don't heat empty rooms), you don't have to worry about humidity problems as much because you are not moving air, though you still may prefer to install a humidifier. You can also heat your domestic water with the boiler or use it as a backup source (with the installation of a heat exchanger or built-in tankless coil in the boiler). You can add snowmelt or if you add an addition, you can tap off the boiler if properly sized. You can get 90+% boilers also, just like a furnace. Plus, baseboard is installed to blanket the outside walls, just where most of the heat loss is. Forced air may blow over the wall, but the wall temperature will be no where near the temperature if you would use the baseboard. Don't go for scorched air. Go for the boiler.
I used to live in a house with a raidant flooring heating system. The heat came up through the hard-wood floor by way of tubes run through the subfloor throughout the house... and let me just say if your feet are warm, you're warm. This house was in detroit and I could, comfortably, set the temperature to about 65 degrees in the house and it would feel as if it was set around 72. The down side is that it is *not* very responsive to quick changes in the temperature. Turning a thermostat up or down takes several hours to notice the change, in either direction so programmable thermastats are pretty much useless if you use a radiant heating system.
