Hey DIY comrades, I was encouraged to post this here instead.
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!
Since it's a closed loop system it won't really matter, and your two options are EPDM and PEX tubing. Anything else is unlikely to be an option an installer would use and may not even be up to code in your area. That's not even to mention the fact that it would be thoroughly cost prohibitive.
Ok thank you. I'll just make sure that when I inevitably flush the system I run that water through some heavy filters. I just wanted to weigh all of my options!
The heating system does not contain water that you use to drink. The microscoping amount of plastic that gets solved doesn't impact the heating system. The most common ones are aluminium-plastic tubing combinations. Not sure how good pure plastic ones are. Also not sure if the garage is part of your flat/houses heating / air volume.
I can only say that if it is part of a flat keramic tiles, wood tiles, cork tiles are neat. I have heard that plastic laminat also works but don't know about it.
I installed cork flooring once and the customer's dog was walking on the already laid flooring and leaving indents with it's nails. I can't imagine what it looks like now.
The cork flooring was at some yoga/gym sports place, so there weren't animals with nails walking around. Was good still after 20 years or so. Good insight though that the use case is important.
Make sure it's 100% closed loop and you're good. There aren't really any better options for that particular heating strategy.
