I would like to convert my forced hot air to radiant heat. My house is about 3 years old and I have an indirect Peerless hot water heater 60 gal. my bolier is a peerless Purefire with 3 zones. my thermostats are Honeywell pro4000. The type of system i would use would be a pex system installed in the floor joists.The bathrooms are tile and the rest of the house is oak hardwood flooring. square footage is about 2100 one level. My question is how much is involved in switching over? How many of the components do I have in my current heating system to make this an easy switch?

The Peerless boiler is fine, but there is substantial expense to retrofitting radiant floors- there's no such thing as an "easy switch". To get the peak and average heating system water temperatures to condensing temps wiithout ripping up all the floors and starting over will require installing aluminum extrusion heat spreaders in the joist bays in which to insert the tubing.

All good heating systems start with a room-by-room heat load calculation, which would be able to tell you how feasable &/or expensive it would be.

A cheaper alternative would be low-temp hydronic panel radiators, which is considerably more comfortable than your current hydronic coil ducted air or a retrofit fin-tube baseboard solutions.

I forgot to mention my forced hot air system is 3 zones. So we are talking tubing, heat spreaders, manifold.... any other big items?. Im in the water treatment business and work with heating specialists all the time that i have relationships with. They would be doing the system along with my help, im wondering if its worth the work or not as far as how involved it is?


-thanks
mike

Extruded aluminum plate "ThermoFin C" made by Radiant Engineering are the thing. About $10/sf installed. You will regret alternatives. Proper room-by-room and knowledgeable zone loading will pay dividends in comfort first and ROI in the long run.

We design a lot of sub-floor radiant systems and let the homeowners DIY the plate installation (labor intensive) with near piping and controls finished up by and experienced technician.