I have a cold room designed into the basement of the house I am building, it is roughly 80 sq ft.  Given that I want it as a cold room  (i.e. vegetable storage room) do I put radiant tubes in the room and just keep the flow shutoff  to that loop unless it is needed, or do I not bother with placing the tubes in at all.

Thanks

This may be an exception to the school of thought which says you should always tube for the future. If you tube, you need to also insulate the slab in order to prevent horrendous heat wastage if it is ever heated. However, depending somewhat on your particular situation, you need to have the slab UNinsulated in order to assure enough contact with the cool ground to ensure it IS a cold room.

Keep in mind that cold rooms DO need some insulation. It is all about the location and what surrounds the cold room down there. I have an ICF cold room which is insulated on all sides and top because of the proximity to heated space on at least two sides in the basement, and, of course, the main floor above (room sits in an outside corner). The room stays cool because it has two insulated sides and, primarily, a completely uninsulated floor exposed to rather cool ground temperatures. Water running out of my deep footing drains is currently coming out at about 49F and in the Summer at 52F. Because I have moderate soil temps that don't seem to change too much, I have the ability to strip away the inside layer of foam insulation on the cold-exposed sides, thereby increasing the heat loss to the cool ground and lowering the temperature inside the cold room. If you live in an area in which the ground temperature changes more with seasonal extremes, that ability is somewhat limited. Stripping away the insulation would expose the cold room to greater temperature swings and you would find it colder in Winter and most likely, too warm in Summer.

part of the room sits on against an outside wall.  I have placed two 4" pipes through the wall at near the top so that I can control somewhat the temperature in the room simply by having one pipe come in near the floor and the other near the roof to facilitate proper air flow.

I never thought about not insulating the floor below the room, that may be a good idea to help stabilize temperature in the room.

It would also be good to but in a thermal break between the heated and unheated area of the slab otherwise you are just defeating the purpose. No tubing.....

I never thought about not insulating the floor below the room, that may be a good idea to help stabilize temperature in the room.

If you run the heat transfer calculations, you will see that is the major factor keeping your cool room cool.