Hydronic radiant in the floor will be more expensive to install up front, but will have HUGE flexiblity in heat source as future energy costs shift.
Unless you're in the land of 5cents/kwh electricity it's usually substantially more expensive to heat with electricity, and if you have electric resistance heating (low voltage or otherwise), you'll be locked into electricity as your heating source for that zone pretty much forever. Any change in heat source will have to overcome the cost hurdle of changing the heat distribution method, not just the heat source. With hot water radiant you can shift between gas/propane/oil/wood/electricity/solar without having to come up with a whole new heat distribution system.
Adding basement zones in an R2000 standards won't be a huge impact on the boiler sizing. Being earth-coupled, the basement is probably only ~5% of your heat load on "design-day", even if it accounts for 15-20% of your average heat load. Most boilers are oversized by 20-200% in the first place (let's hope a full heat-loss calc was done at the time it was specified/purchased.)
If it turns out the floor is not insulated, going with a radiant ceiling or low-temp panel radiators is still a decent way to go. (And electric radiant floor a TERRIBLE way to go.) If you can take the hit in headroom, adding even R5 (1") XPS under 0.75-1.25" of finish flooring (a ~2" loss of total headroom) is probably worthwhile. If you can take an even bigger hit, a radiant-embedded 2" slab or panel system (Warmboard, etc) over R5 XPS + finish flooring (2.5-4" loss of headroom) will still be cheaper to run than electricity in most markets. If you can get R10+ it'll still be cost-effective on the insulation part, but for every additional R5 you lose an inch of headroom. |