Right on! Should I sign you up to purchase one of those beautiful tread signatures? Keep ‘em spinning!

Thanks,
Wynne

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I agree that there is a place in the market for every product., and I am flattered by your comment that Warmboard offers forced air response times with all the benefits of radiant! While this is a slight overstatement (Warmboard takes a little longer to react than forced air) it’s true that it is indeed faster than most other radiant systems.

Keep up the good work! Oh, and as a cycling enthusiast, I particularly enjoyed reading about ARTCRANK.

All the best,

Tony

I would guess Warmboard is a perfect solution for delivering heat in your home climate of Aptos, CA. I lived in and around the Bay Area for 20 years, where it can be 45 degrees F in the morning and 80 by 3pm. When selling the benefits of Warmboard, your sales people often cite these kinds of days – the classic overshoot/undershoot conditions. Here in MN, the weather is not generally like this. In any given year, MN witnesses, on average, 6 days where the temperature swings 35 degrees F between high and low temperatures. It is a rare day where a home needs heat at one point in the day and cooling in another – or even heat in one part of the day but no heat in another. Starting about October 15th, we have about 200 straight days of cool to downright cold weather. Whatever heat we can take in passively is heat we don’t have to purchase via fossil fuel. That’s money in the pocket, and less stuff we have to import from elsewhere.

Many of Locus’ homes are designed to be passively cooled and heated to the extent possible, given site and budget. We feel this is simply a responsible design strategy to save energy. Warmboard doesn’t give us the option – to my knowledge – of collecting heat and transferring it back to a central location to be utilized later. For this storage, we use mass. Does this mean our homes occasionally overshoot on a sunny afternoon? Sure. Perhaps our clients have to crack a window or two (as you outline on the Warmboard blog) on a handful of days to maintain temperature. We don’t look at this as negative – most people get so little fresh air in the heating months in MN, opening a window is great! Furthermore, we don’t feel any of the negatives (responsiveness, lack of constancy) suggest we chuck high mass systems in exchange for low mass systems. We recognize each has a place in the market.

On the Warmboard blog, Terry writes, “Conductivity is King…Mass is Not!” He says high mass systems have an “Achilles heel,” are “inconsistent” and cause “discomfort.” That’s heady stuff. In fifteen years of designing homes in the upper Midwest, I have not had a single client complain of the lack of responsiveness or lack of comfort of a high-mass radiant floor heat system. To be completely honest, most of them rave about their radiant floor heat – both high mass systems and those where we’ve used Warmboard. If we felt sluggish response were a big issue, we would work with a client to program a setback thermostat to mitigate the undershoot/overshoot problem – but we’d also discuss the compromise between instant responsiveness and energy savings. Whatever the sales pitch, we’re not talking about wool coats in the morning and tank tops in the afternoon. My business partner Paul lives in a house chock full of thermal mass, and after attending several Warmboard presentations, he’s confused. He says he is not aware of the overshoot/undershoot problem.

There have been studies linking worker productivity to changing daylight conditions in office environments; I don’t have any basis for this, but perhaps there is some benefit to having your thermal environment change slightly as the day goes by. I would guess there is a physical benefit to avoiding static environments – visually and thermally.

I don’t have any problem with Warmboard as a product. We use it. We like it. We don’t agree that high-mass systems are inherently poor. I would agree with you Warmboard is perfect for someone that absolutely demands the responsiveness of forced-air systems but also covets the obvious benefits of radiant heat. Warmboard is also great for clients who want radiant floor heat and wood flooring. We’ll continue to use it for homes, cabins mainly, where the owners only intermittently use the building. However, we still feel passive homes in our climate will use less energy with high thermal mass as interior storage – despite minor thermal fluctuation. Given the problem of Trombe type walls competing with the view, the easiest place to deploy mass is on the floor – with radiant heat. We will continue to design our homes with this thinking, until we feel we’ve found a better solution.

Thanks!
Wynne

Thanks for the Warmboard mention, it’s one of my favorite green products too!

With respect to high mass, what about it is better for a cold climate? Our way of thinking is that the purpose of any radiant panel is to deliver the heat from the tube to the living space as effectively as possible. Any low mass system, especially ones constructed with a highly conductive material (aluminum), will allow heat to be stored efficiently in a central location then delivered when and as needed to the living areas. A high mass system conversely stores the heat in the radiant panel where it may or may not be needed, creating what is in the industry called overshoot and undershoot. Here’s a link to a document with more detail.

http://www.warmboard.com/public-relations/warmboard-radiant-heat-blog/

Warm regards,

Tony Gasparich
President and COO
Warmboard, Inc.