The concept of using hydronic heating is neither new nor old. Hydronic heating has been around for a while, and although many people can only think of the old radiant steam registers in their home growing up, there are many new types of hydronic heating available on the market today.
Hydronic heating is a term that is used to describe the heating of a building or structure by means of heat-transfer through the medium of water. To simplify this, all hydronic heating is, is warming or cooling water in one location and transferring that cool or warm temperature to another. Let’s take for example a fire, well for obvious reasons we cannot use a fire directly to heat our home, it will burn down. Instead, we use the fire in the form of a boiler which super heats the water into steam where it travels through a series of pipes into the home and then transfer the heat of that fire into the living spaces.
We all remember the old radiators in our or our grandparent’s homes, well the main reason we have not seen these as much today, is that the technology of hydronics have changed and adapted. No one wants a bulky, visible radiator in their home that a child can burn themselves on; instead, the radiator may be built into your flooring or a baseboard which is much safer.
Many of us may even have a solid foundation floor in a one story ranch, the pipes for the hydronics can actually be laid directly into the concrete to not only provide heating in the winters, but during the summers you can also cool the house using the same exact pipes.
Hydronics is such an efficient means of transferring heat that even many cities across the country has a district hydronic system where a large boiler, maybe a power plant, is located somewhere in the city and the pipes flow under the streets and warm the buildings in the downtown area. Not only does this type of system heat the buildings, but it keeps ice from forming on the roads under which the piping flows.
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