As the title suggests, I'm building a garage pad and basement and I am planning to do radiant floor heating so I can transition to geothermal heating in a year or two. However I don't like the idea of plastic pipes in the system as plastic leeches into water, and especially hot water. Is there a non plastic option? I've read it's possible to do copper but that it has to be sleeved and with the price of copper it'll be very expensive. Or does it really matter if it's a closed loop system? What are my options? Thanks guys!
Also I hope this is the right place to post this?
whats bad about plastic leeching into water that i assume you wouldnt be drinking? or maybe im wrong on that and you would be drinking it.
Well we're running it from our own well. If it's a closed system then theoretically it should be fine. However if it circulates water all that plastic-y water will end up back in my well and I'll end up drinking it.
I'm not sure you'd be able to do that with non-plastic pipe, why not just use hot water baseboard heat? That's going through copper so it should be theoretically safer. But doing radiant with copper sounds insanely expensive. Also how will the geothermal be integrated? If you're not pumping/dumping hot water into a natural source then having the heating water be drinkable is definitely less of a priority.
Yes copper would be insanely expensive, that's why I was wondering if there's another option for me. My understanding with geothermal is the water is pumped underground to heat it then it comes back up again so I spend less electricity to heat it. The geothermal person told me it works best with a radiant heat set up, plus radiant heat has pipe run through the whole foundation whereas I'm not sure how these baseboard heaters work. I know electric baseboard heaters are set up as multiple units throughout a house, is that how these water baseboard heaters work too?
Yeah if it's a closed system I'm less worried, but if it's not all that water that's picked up plastic ends up back in my well. That's what I don't want to happen.
water baseboard works just like radiant, hot water goes through the radiators on a loop, that have metal fins on them to disperse the heat, a little less luxurious than radiant ( and lots of the time the runs between the baseboards is plastic anyways). I'm not sure what type of geothermal system you're using, but if it's a heat pump system you should be fine - those can be like 6 feet deep depending on the setup so it's unlikely the water would even touch your well if it leaked out. (Your water heater would be re-supplying the system continuously so you could tell a leak via a spike in the water bill)
