More house/building questions - good alternatives to electric baseboard heat?

Now that our current house is officially under contract, we're trying to put in an offer on the next place we want to live in.

I've only seen photos of the place so far (flying out in two weeks time to look at it and hopefully put in the offer) but one of the issues my wife noticed when viewing the place is that it has electric baseboard heat and one or two a/c window units for heating and cooling. We've rented places with electric baseboard heat in the past and the electric bills were not fun.

The good news is that the climate there is relatively mild (NoVa/WV panhandle) and doesn't quite have the extremes we're seeing here, so I think we can get away with less cooling and less heat than we'd need here in winter.

The bad news is that the place is an 1880s brick colonial (a real one, not a fake one). so running forced air ducting might be somewhere between prohibitively expensive and not really feasible. Or both.

We also don't have a ton of money to play with as the place also needs a garage and is a little close to the top of our budget with that. OTOH we're probably looking at a smaller garage and more comfort in the house.

What I'm hoping for is a more efficient way to heat the place, at least in the rooms that we tend to use most. We're happy to augment the heat with wood burning stoves or fireplaces (assuming the latter work, haven't checked yet).

On the face of it, mini-splits might be the answer for ease of installation if we can live with the ugliness, but gut feeling says that they might not be the best choice if we're looking at 4-5 rooms.

WWGRMD?

I wouldn't have the patience or the drive to own a 140 yr old house.  It may be good for you but I know my own limits.  

I hear you - I've got some experience with that as my side of the family has lived in old houses for quite a while and we're rather familiar with the issues and as a result, aren't going into it completely blind. The main downside is that I'm the only one from my side of the family who is not a civil engineer or a contractor.

Heck, compared to the place my mum owns, this is a brand new house. The foundations/basement of my mum's farm house are from medieval times, and the rest is at least from the mid-1800s and suspected to be much older in parts.

I have some experience with this as my ex's house was built in the late 1800's and addition parts of it were fitted with electric baseboards.  Her advantage was the front, older part is heated with a gas fired hot water boiler and radiators.  We replaced the electric baseboards with water baseboards connected to the boiler system.

Without seeing a full layout of the house and fuel options available (natural gas or would you need oil or propane?).  Does the house have a functional (reasonably dry and secure) basement that you can install a boiler system in?

Adding a hot water system can be done, although in older houses it usually isn't pretty. In my ex's house, most of the water and heating piping are exposed in the rooms (the house was originally heated with a coal furnace of some type). I think it's called "character" but if you're not used to old houses it may seem odd.  

A/C in an old house like this usually means an extensive renovation to make room for ductwork and slightly less extensive work to run high velocity ductwork system.  As you mentioned, mini-splits are much easier and cheaper. 

Well, looks like a total reading comprehension fail on my part.

Going back to the listing, if one looks in the right place is specifically says "Heating: Hot Water" and "Heating: Oil". So I'm guessing it's got an oil furnace in the basement and the baseboard heaters are actually water baseboards. Which would make a lot more sense and is the type of system I grew up with as they've very common in Europe.

Either way it sounds like mini splits are the way to go if we want to dump the window units.

Anything. ANYTHING is a good alternative to electric baseboard heat. 

Sounds like mini splits are a good option if you need to retrofit. Probably cheaper to run a mini split on the shoulder season and summer and use the oil In the real cold.  

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :

I’m a fan/ own mini splits, running the tubing isn’t always obvious. It took me over a year to sort everything out.  

You can do very efficient insert in an existing fireplace fairly inexpensively, if you are going to use wood to heat.  You can use electric fans to circulate the warm air

I have seen older cast iron baseboard heat too.. they looked like more modern stuff, but were actually mini-radiators.

Personally, I love radiator heat. With the age of this place, I would be tempted to rip out the modern water baseboard heat and put in real radiators in it's place.

What could be better than baseboard electric heat?  The units are very inexpensive.  It's flexible--you can mount a baseboard unit just about anywhere.   Excellent multi-zone control--each unit can have it's own thermostat.  You can shut off rooms you don't use, or custom-tailor thermostat settings to your liking.

The only way you could better turn your heating dollars into heat would be to stack a nice wad of bills on the floor and set fire to it.

1988RedT2 said:

What could be better than baseboard electric heat?  The units are very inexpensive.  It's flexible--you can mount a baseboard unit just about anywhere.   Excellent multi-zone control--each unit can have it's own thermostat.  You can shut off rooms you don't use, or custom-tailor thermostat settings to your liking.

The only way you could better turn your heating dollars into heat would be to stack a nice wad of bills on the floor and set fire to it.

It depends on your costs. In every case I've ever put pencil to paper to, gas comes out on top, and it isn't even close. 

That being said, you do point out a lot of good things about electric. My parents have baseboard heating, gas powered and run through a boiler. It is very good, but there are a few rooms that they do have an electric setup--basically, the kitchen and the bathrooms since they removed the baseboards when they re-did the kitchen. They're still hooked up to the thermostats (3 zones), so they kick on at the same time as the gas system, and it was easy to install.

Not interested. 

I'm not happy with the efficiency our house built in the 80's with new windows and all new HVAC. 

The next place I buy is going to be as energy efficient as I can afford. I'd rather spend more on the mortgage than utilities. 

In reply to Toebra :

I was just going to suggest that. An insert pellet or wood stove works really really well in place of an open hearth.

Mini splits are pretty good too. The ones with the variable speed DC inverters are super efficient.

In reply to mtn :

Your house also needs to have enough electrical service to handle electric baseboards, which are typically 2 pole breakers. A lot of old houses do not. 

I'm with John.  I love the charm and character of the older homes but have no desire to own or live in one.  If this house is at the top of your price range, you may want to reconsider.  Do you want to spend all of your very limited free time working on the house? 

BoxheadTim said:

Going back to the listing, if one looks in the right place is specifically says "Heating: Hot Water" and "Heating: Oil". So I'm guessing it's got an oil furnace in the basement and the baseboard heaters are actually water baseboards.

Quoting this, for all the people who skated right past it and continued talking about electric heat.

docwyte said:

I'm with John.  I love the charm and character of the older homes but have no desire to own or live in one.  If this house is at the top of your price range, you may want to reconsider.  Do you want to spend all of your very limited free time working on the house? 

Just to clarify this, top of the price range means that I can't divert $50k from the money we get from the sale of our current house to build a garage mahal immediately, not that we'd end up totally house poor.  The house payment is still going to end up in the 20% or less range of my base salary alone. 

It would be expensive, but I have seen forced air heat done in old houses.  If it's a 2 story, you can just duct it into cast iron floor grates and put some returns/grates in the second floor.  Not the most efficient or even heating, but it can work.  I have also seen it done with a small framed/drywalled corner in a room to conceal the duct.

Chances are that you also have a laundry chute or old dumbwaiter somewhere in the walls.  My 1937 house in Pittsburgh had a laundry chute in the middle of the house.  It shared common walls in all but two rooms; the dining room downstairs and the guest room upstairs.  They just ran the duct up the center and cut vents in the wall.  The downstairs wasn't a problem because it was open enough that common airspace circulated enough heat.  The upstairs guest room they just ran a duct under the floor.  From the looks of things when I did carpet in there, they pulled up the T&G subfloor to lay in the duct.

As I am not familiar with such aged homes, is it out of line to think about water heated floors? 

For cooling you seem to be set on the split units which are great. For a recent historical building project my group did choose to go with ceiling mounted air conditioning units as we were allowed to add penetrations to the roof but not the exterior walls. They have been shrinking them and improving their efficiency over the years with intent to get into residential sales. 

Mom and dad have an oil furnace and hot water baseboards supplemented with a woodstove.  The woodstove is a bit of a labor-intensive thing.  If you cut your own wood on your own property, it's a crap-ton of labor but cheap.  Buying wood is usually not a cost effective means of heating.

Given you geographic area, hydrocarbons can be pretty cheap, so a hot water/oil baseboard might not be a terrible thing.  The real drawback to it is that it's passive.  It heats up a strip and the air it warms just floats to the ceiling.  Its like having a radiator in a car without a fan or a grille to move air.  It isn't efficient at heating.  In mom and dad's house, you sit on the couch and freeze, then stand up and your head is suddenly in a pool of hot air.  It is worst in their half-subterranian living room (split level) so they have a small fan to mix it up.  If they use the wood stove, that room is sweltering and upstairs is frigid.  If they use just the baseboards, all the hot air passively floats to the upstairs and the living room is chilly.

That is one of the reasons a forced air system is more efficient.  Find a way to move air and I think you'll find that the baseboard/oil isn't terrible.

I realize this is no longer a need, as you have realized you don't have electric baseboards (crappy).  You have oil fired hot water baseboards (very good).

I will however offer this input for older houses.  High velocity mini duct systems are perfect for older houses.  They push air through small PVC pipes instead of large sheet metal ducts, and can be retrofitted in virtually any configuration.  They offer both heat and air conditioning.  Systems typically run 25%- 35% more than conventional hot air systems.

Glad to hear you don't need this, but I figured someone might, and was a little surprised that high velocity systems had not yet been mentioned for older houses.

In reply to SVreX :

I did as I've installed a high velocity duct system.  My ex- (who is a HVAC engineer) did the design.

The high velocity mini duct systems are common in older houses in Chicago. The "brand name" originator is SpacePak but there are others. Some HVAC guys will claim they're outdated due to min-splits, but they have a LOT of advantages over a mini-split. Not the least of which is, you don't have to penetrate your outside walls in every room, and you don't have the large wall mount units in every room.

What about noise?  High velocity = high sound levels, generally speaking.