Solar radiant floor heating for Tack room in barn

 I am building a post-frame barn which will have a 10x14' tack room
which will be heated.  I live near in Canada near Winnipeg so the
winters are severe but sunny.

I am looking for documentation on how to prepare a concrete slab for
Solar Radiant heat.

Also looking for sizing and simple design of system.  The collectors
would be mounted above the height of the tack room.  How do collectors
function when mounted to a straight wall?

Any advice would help..

Cheers

   thedblc@mts.net wrote:


For a good site of slab prep (though I find that I disagree about the
hole in the middle of the insulation, and as it's not something you can
decided to do differently later, I did not put one in):

http://www.radiantcompany.com/details/grade.shtml

I've bought some stuff from them and consider tham to be a pretty
reasonable vendor in the US. But it's probably simpler for you to buy
from your own side of the border.


Not so badly if there's snow on the ground, actually. The angle is not
good, but the reflected light helps with that, and you don't have snow
building up on the collector.


In Canada, look up thermo dynamics as a potential vendor.

http://www.thermo-dynamics.com/

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by

 

A couple of years ago I installed my own radiant heat system in my
woodworking shop and bought my supplies from these guys:
http://www.radiantec.com/

You won't find much better info online than the link above that Ecnerwal
provided, and believe me, I did a TON of looking around.

Regarding the hole in the middle of the insulation under the slab, my
understanding is that there are two approaches:

1) Leave a hole as demonstrated in the installation shown on the above site.
This method uses the earth for heat storage.  The benefit is that the
temperature will remain stable after the some of the ground below the slab
is heated.  The downside is that the slab takes longer to heat.

2) Insulate under the entire slab - this improves response time when
introducing heat to the system.  I took this approach since I don't heat the
shop continuously.

You might check out the http://builditsolar.com  site as well as
http://www.arttec.net/

Hope this helps!

Eric

 thedblc@mts.net wrote:

Heliodyne as well. Find a local vendor their website is not customer
oriented.
Michelle