I live in a very cozy, though highly outdated home on the west side of town. Many of the houses around mine were built in the 1950’s, as well as my own house, so they haven’t aged well internally when it comes to appliances or other equipment indoors. The house has always looked nice from the outside, but the inside definitely needed some updates to catch up to the 21st century! The plumbing was pretty old, and there were unnecessary landlines for phones still in the walls that felt like an eyesore. However, I was most concerned with the radiator in the living room, which was practically nothing more than a paperweight! The radiator had been working at maybe ten percent of its original capacity since before I moved in, and it has been a blight on my life during every passing winter. This year, I had enough of trying to make due with such awful HVAC components in the house, so I got in touch with the HVAC service technician that usually handles my home’s A/C tune-ups. When I pressed him about switching out the radiator, he couldn’t help but laugh! He confessed that he has been waiting for me to say “the radiator has to go” for over a year, as the radiator has never been in decent condition! With that in mind, I felt like radiators are likely a dead technology, so I asked what he suggested as a new alternative. He talked to me about radiant floor heating, which is essentially the same concepts behind a radiator but implanted under the floorboards. That sounded exactly like what I wanted to bring my house into the 2000’s with the rest of us!
The different types of thermostats