Old House, New Heat Project

Green Products/Techniques Considering:
Radiant Heating

Details: Our interest/intention is to install radiant heating in our old house (100 years), located in northern NJ, which is in pretty good shape. The steam boiler is gone so we need to decide what to do and get make decisions shortly. The house has about 1900 sq. ft. on two floors. Instead of just buying a new steam boiler, we think a gas boiler/high efficiency water heater to distribute the heat via new flooring/tubing may be the way to go. We would like to remove the existing radiators as they take up valuable space in the small rooms, especially upstairs. Nice flooring to replace some of the beat-up flooring is an expected benefit to the project too. The flooring component of the project is a vexing part of our design planning at this point. Would the existing hardwood floors have to be removed for a new subfloor/tubing and new engineered flooring? Also there is an upstairs bathroom with an existing radiator, but tearing up the existing tile/install new pex, etc. isn't something we would like to do now. Some of the other forums on this site debate electric/hydronic approaches to the radiant distribution. We're leaning toward hydronic but if an electronic solution makes sense, we would like to understand the factors that could apply to our situation. The new flexible electric mats/strips seem to offer a simpler installation vs. the hydronic requirements, however the low temperature hydronic configurations appear to be the standard approach for most houses. Has anyone been involved in a project like this? Any information or advice would be appreciated! Unfortunately (or probably fortunately), I won't be able to do much work myself due to the timeframe and the work load at my job. Thanks, Scott