Tell me about Hot water baseboard heat?
 

Looking at buying a house built in 1955,very nice brick house.I noticed the house has Hot water baseboard heat.Is that good or bad?I know nothing about it,the heating unit looks like it is only 10 years old.Thanks in advance!:)

I love my baseboard heat!no drafts,consistant warmth..3zones here.a zone is each area of the home you will heat when the t_stat calls for heat..take the time to remove the "covers"and vacuum ,blow out the debris from previous owners lack of maintenance..nice evenheat..

My 2 homes as a kid were hydronic,as well as the 1st house I bought. Much more efficient than forced air,especially if it is a newer unit. I WISH I had hydronic in my current home. If they ran lines under the basement floor,even better.
Drawback is that a new hydronic "furnace" I believe is double what a comparable forced air would run. Also many older homes with hydro heat don't have central A/C,too expensive for most people to run ducting just for the luxury of A/C.

The only time I have had hot water heat when I was stationed in Germany in the mid 80s.We had the old style radiators and mine you could not shut off completely.I had to open the windows when I was in there!

Is it expensive?I would not think it would be very efficent?

The house does have central air.I was thinking of converting to gas forced air in a couple of years using the central air ducting.

Great heating system, over the years I had it in two houses, one natural gas fired and one oil fired (Long Island). Great even heat, in my opinion much better than forced air, BUT, no ducts for central air.

cast iron baseboard hot water is the best. radiators stay hot when furnace is off for a long time. i had two houses with it & i loved it.

I will snap a couple pics of unit tomorrow,they are inspecting the house then.

Hot water baseboard heat
 

I have hot water baseboard heat in my shore house.
It's wonderful when we go there in the winter
Turn it up to 70, and 20 minutes later the house is toasty! ;)
There is no sudden burst of warmth follower by a slow cooling off period like a forced hot air furnace, just a steady, warm heat.
I can't compare the cost of one to the other, but if I had to choose, it would be hot water baseboard heat any day.
Ron

Hot water baseboard speaks quality. Most houses have forced air because it's cheaper to install and is also compatible with AC. Hot water baseboard is a more even heat. You will like it.

I'm happy to get the great responses,it just puzzles me why it is not more popular?

Does it cost more to use hot water BB vs forced air?

I have a boiler with 2 exchange units (radiators in a housing with fans and filters) (one in basement and one in attic). The boiler warms the water and circulates thru the radiators. Then a fan blows the warm air through insulated duct work. This is a great system because you alos install central air.

Initial expense,and it can be more expensive to fix.
The BB SHOULD be a little more efficient to run.

Baseboard water heat
 

Blue 66 you have stumbled upon one of the most efficient systems on the market (by coincidence). 1) you have forced air A/C with duct work. You can install an A coil in the air plenum that circulates hotwater for the damp/cool days when you don't want the baseboard rads coming up to tempearture. These are designed for the cool spring/fall mornings and nights where you only want supplemental heat until the sun comes up and the ambient temperature of the outside air is greater than the inside air temperature. 2) You can install a gas/oilfired (computer controlled) water boiler that supplies both your domestic and your heating water for your baseboards. The gas units hang on the wall and are about the size of a 24 of beer. The way they work is if you turn on your kitchen hot water tap then the computer diverts the water to your faucet. The minute you shut off the tap the computer diverts the water back to the baseboards until the thermostat shuts the boiler off. You never run out of hotwater. I would suspect this might already be the case as the contractor wouldn't have all these features you describe and not know what he was doing. It would be like walking into someones garage and there is a set of ram air 1V heads laying on the floor, matching block etc and the owner telling you the previous owner removed them up at a salvage yard but didn't know if they were worth anything. Ed

Baseboard hot water is great for heat. The cost to add AC is not. Space pac units are expensive to install and maintain.

Thank you Ed for the explanation.I will get some pics in a couple hours so you can see what I have.The heating unit looks small and there is a small tank near the ceiling that is a little larger diameter than a 2 liter bottle and it goes into the wall.

Thank you everyone who has posted

Ok here is a couple pics.The inspector thought the unit was pretty old.

Baseboard water heat
 

The unit looks to be from the 80's, they were a good brand name. You can easily upgrade to a high efficiency unit and go from there. Boiler unit and circuit board wholesale costs around 2200.00 Cdn. I would have to see the baseboard units to tell you the efficiency of those. Too bad you're so far away I have a line on 50-60 units that were removed from a brand new condo unit. Could give you a real deal on them. I sold over 80 units last year for 150.00/each. They retailed for about 1000.00/each.

installed many wiel mclain boilers, mostly oil heat. good boiler older one but not bad, more efficient these days

Baseboard heat has the second best heating curve out there. The first one is in floor heating. Those old weil mclains are not as effcient as the new ones but they are very reliable. Not to much to break on them. If maintained good you'll probably get another 10 years or so out of it.