Let’s be honest: More than a few customers have champagne tastes but exist on a beer budget. 

An installer is asked to provide a relatively simple single-zone, slab-type floor heating system supplied by a geothermal water-to-water heat pump. He’s heard that a hydraulic separator is a good component in such systems.

The piping strapped to the bottom of the floor joists is supposedly part of a primary loop.

An installer is asked to use a pellet-fired boiler to supply heat to two zones of low-temperature radiant floor panels. The system includes a three-way motorized mixing valve to reduce the supply water temperature to the distribution circuits.

The designer’s intent was to supply a low-temperature floor-heating zone, as well as a higher-temperature baseboard zone and air handler, from a thermal storage tank heated by a pellet-fueled boiler.

The system was intended to supply one high-temperature heating zone, a couple of medium-temperature zones and two zones of floor heating for a garage and breezeway where antifreeze protection was needed.

A homeowner asks his local heating installer if a geothermal heat pump can be combined with radiant floor heating. The system he creates is meant to supply a dozen independently controlled zones of low-temperature floor heating.

An installer is asked to provide a system that supplies two zones of fin-tube baseboard and two zones of floor heating. The system also supplies domestic water heating. He selects a mod/con boiler because it’s lighter than a conventional boiler.

An installer plans to use a geothermal heat pump to supply warm water to a multizone radiant ceiling panel system.  Having heard that radiant ceiling panels also can be used for cooling, he decides to pump chilled water through the same radiant ceiling distribution system.