Radiant heat vs. Modern Heating. Go.

I am the first to admit I love radiant heat — in old homes, I tend to keep the radiators whenever possible. As we dove into this basement renovation I had a serious internal debate about working with the current and very old radiant system. At the end of the day the right decision for my family was to modernize our heating and cooling systems. We had found major mold behind old leaking radiant pipes... which needless to say was quite motivating. (And as a visual person, the 70's style dumpy radiators that they replaced the old gems with were hardly worth designing around in the entire home upstairs.)

After loads of research and even a power point presentation to my husband of why (he's a tough sell) we should replace the old boiler and radiators, I landed on Trane Residential. I was mainly drawn to their Air Cleaner that is now hooked up to our new HVAC system. Something that was a big pull for our family as it’s certified asthma & allergy friendly and is 100X more effective than a standard 1” air filter. Side note — I kind of love the name Trane, it’s very strong. Great name for a dog?? They don’t call it "the Rolls Royce of HVAC" for nothin’ (...the only Rolls Royce I am interested in.) This HVAC update was MASSIVE and not something I am interested in doing again in my lifetime, so I wanted to make sure to do this once and do it RIGHT.

Let’s rewind a bit to where it all started. I naively thought this project would take me two months tops… how hard could it be!? I would clean up all the old stuff, cover it from top to bottom with a coat of paint, and make us a proper arts and crafts space. But it became very clear after we started working through 120 years of old wires and pipes that this was a much bigger project than I could have ever imagined. The kind that takes a whole year… not just two months.

Nonetheless, we continued to get rid of all the old telephone wires, cable wires, gas pipes, etc., slowly peeling back years and years worth of systems that no longer had any use in the house the way we live now. As we worked our way though all the old, one daunting question kept coming up: If we are truly going to modernize this house then shouldn’t our biggest priority be to update that massive dinosaur of a boiler, which most likely made its way into the basement a hundred years ago.

Removing the boiler would be a beast — it was as big as the entire back room of the basement, and the pipes coming out of it ran extremely low off of the ceiling all throughout the basement and up in to the house.

I, like most of us homeowners, would much rather spend my money on cosmetic updates, but the truth is, how you feel in a space is just as important as how it looks.

So we started what we like to call… the '“great debate…” do we keep the old radiators and boiler, or do we go for it with a modern Trane Residential forced air system?

Like I mentioned before, after a lot of research (like you see above) and some serious conversations about what was best for our family... we decided to take out the old boiler and make the switch to a more modern Trane Residential forced air system. Eeeek. I know radiant heat is special to some people, and believe me, I get it, but for us, the return on investment was worth it. We got so much space back; we are so much more in control over how the different zones of our house feel; and we now have a cleaner air system as well. It was a MASSIVE project, one I am thankful not to do again, but now we get to enjoy this beautiful space together!

I am so glad we did it! Can’t stop a Trane, baby.

This update not only changed the way we experience our basement, but the entire home. We got loads of square footage back and we got our walls back upstairs where all of our dumpy old radiators (filled with mold and mildew) were. It was tough to reconcile opening up walls again after we seemingly had finished construction up there but now that all of the mold and mildew has been removed I feel much safer living here with my family. And let’s face it, I’m a designer, so yes the entire house just looks so much BETTER!