I have roughy 1700 sq foot basement. Pex is installed in concrete floor. 5 zones. Propane roughed in for heat source.
Question: Need a full manifold setup with all components and heat source recommendation and advice on thermostat control, air or floor sensor? Multiple rooms/zones. Can I use wireless thermostats? This would be my first choice since room is finished and about to lay tile floor. Do floor sensors need to be per zone? This room also has ceiling ducts for forced hot air/ac via heat pump.

One needs a room-by-room heat loss analysis to make zoning decisions. Air and slab temperature sensors are associated with each zone thermostat. Slab temperature sensors greatly improve controllability, but are not absolutely required. Heat source selection depends on local fuel availability and cost and one needs to run numbers to make the best determination. We have free DIY software on our website to do that.

Thanks for replying. I do not have real heat loss numbers but the slab is insulated underneath and the house is energy Star compliant if that helps so heat loss should be on the low side.
Propane will be the fuel source. I was also interested in a duel purpose on demand heater for floor and hot water heater. Not sure if this is reasonable or affordable? Thoughts?

I plan on using forced hot air to heat the room air and slab heat to keep the tile floor comfortable. I thought I might use a wireless thermostat with a temp sensor on the baseboard about 2 inches above the tile floor in each zone.
Two zones will be used.

Should I build my own manifold and control board or just have one built and delivered? I'm very good with building and fabrication just not sure of the engineering side of it.

What you are describing is what is known as a combi boiler, fairly common these days and space efficient.
We provide prefabricated pump panels that can be combined with our combi boilers. The domestic hot water is isolated from the heating side of the system.
A single zone pump panel and combi boiler package will run about $4,500. and are a easy install for most home owners. You will need a gas technician to assist in gas pipe sizing and after install provide a combustion analysis to fine tune the boiler. The rest is fairly straight forward.
http://www.blueridgecompany.com/product/pump-distribution-panels/394 this link is to our prefab options you will be looking for the Column pump panel group. There are some photos as well, might give you some ideas should you build your own.
Good luck,
Dan

Where are you located? Or more to the point, what are your local fuel costs? Reason I ask, if you are just planning to temper your floor temperature and can use electric, you could use a NextGen boiler. The NextGen boiler is actually a HR heating appliance that contains all the required HR components to easily complete a HR system. It just connects to your HR manifold and costs about $1500. You would still need a way to heat domestic water, but quality electric or propane tankless heaters can be obtained for relatively low cost these days.

Located in the Northern Kentucky / Greater Cincinnati area. Propane is already run 3/4 line stubbed in. Electric is also just a few short feet away. Planned on using the propane since the rest of the house is electric heat pump and propane is relatively inexpensive and can be used with an electric outage via small backup generator.

Heat source selection really comes down to the ROI (Return on Investment) analysis. Determine the acquisition cost of the various heat source options. Determine the annual maintenance and operation cost of the various heat source options. Assume the heat sources will last for some period of years, perhaps 15 or 20 years. Pick the heat source with lowest total cost.

There are also pros and cons to consider. Gas boilers don’t like to be short cycled and tend to have a shorter life because of the mechanical complexity. Gas boilers are more difficult to install than electric boilers and require annual maintenance. Gas boilers that have not been installed properly or have not been properly maintained have been known to cause house fires.

Here’s the link to the NextGen boiler so you can better understand how it can simplify a HR system installation if an electric heat source having a 1.0 COP provides an acceptable annual operation cost:

NextGen Boiler

No matter how you elect to go, you will still need to ascertain how much heat gain the boiler should provide before you can select it (e.g., accomplish an ACCA Manual J8 analysis). Too much heat gain can lead to lower efficiency and potential short cycle issues. Too little heat gain may not get the job done. It sounds like a relatively small boiler should accomplish what you are pursuing. John Siegenthaler's "Modern Hydronic Heating" is a great read on all things associated with this subject.

Oh boy,
Ok, I'll bite
A gas boiler combi is typically sized with some attention to the DHW production.
A 140,000 btu combi unit will provide about 3.5 GPM with a 70 degree rise.
Similar production on a electric on demand might be in the 40 KW range, not sure its a good question
how many KW to make 3.5 GPM / 70 degree rise? (50 degree entering water temp - 120 degree at tap).
OK Combi boilers usually turn down 5-1 so yes base value would be 28,000 BTU.
There designed to modulate.
Yep, need to be serviced,
yep need a gas line sized right as well as the 200 line for the electric. Both suck juice. BTU's are BTU's.
Of all the boilers I have sold now and installed I can not think of one gas unit causing a fire. But I have only been at it 35 years so I am new at this.
I can say I have see electric boiler circuit boards flame out from time to time.
The gas boiler system does offer the ability to drive the system on a 15 amp plug outlet.
Not sure you could get much out of electric in that range in a no power situation.
To be clear, I am neutral on electric or gas appliances. Both have there place.
We design and sell both systems.
My 2 cents
Dan

The minimum modulated output of a combi boiler is probably a significant multiple of the design heat load of a 1700' basement (especially a basement insulated to IRC 2015 code min), and LUDICROUSLY oversized for the heat load of any single sub-zone of said basement. A micro-zoned basement is a recipe for short cycling the equipment into lower efficiency &/or shorter lifespan.

Without a good handle on the individual zone loads and the whole-basement load it's a bit hard to spec the equipment. Electric boilers can be a pretty cheap solution, and have a better shot at being right-sized. They don't take an efficiency hit when short cycling, but it's still nicer to the equipment (and the grid) if it's not short cycling a bigger than necessary electric load. Don't rule it out, but be very careful to not oversize it.

A tank type combi boiler is essentially short-cycle proof, utilizing the thermal mass of the water in the tank to establish a minimum burn time. It can be many times oversized for the heat load without increasing the number of burn cycles (much), and might be the "right" solution to your likely nano-loaded micro-zones.

Right Dana, that was precisely my point, but with less capital letters and such... I would guess that a $1500 NextGen-4 (4kW or 13,652 Btu/h) electric boiler would fully address this small basement HR heating mission with zero additional HR panel expense. At the lowest modulation level, it only put outs 4,550 Btu/h and this boiler only needs a 30 amp breaker. The domestic hot water could then be addressed with a $500ish electric or propane tankless water heater.

The combi propane boiler approach might be worth the much higher expense if one really felt compelled to have a propane boiler for this small basement HR heating mission because of reduced operational cost or for power outage redundancy...but the house is already being fully heated with an electric heat pump, so this small basement HR heating mission is only supplemental.

If the domestic hot water is currently being served up by a propane water heater it may make sense to cobble up an external heat exchanger Rube Goldberg contraption to serve the basement heating zones, if it happens that propane is cheaper than electricity (I doubt it for KY, but it varies by local market.)

There are some cheap sub $1K electric boilers that could probably fill the bill too, but if we don't know the loads we can't pick one.

It's possible with an insulated slab and insulated foundation walls that the whole shebang could be served by an $800 1-phase non-modulating 120V 1.1 kw electric boiler like the EMB-S-1 on a 15A 120V circuit. sailawayrb is right that since the space also has ducts to the heat pump system the electric boiler doesn't even need to cover the 99% design heat load, but it would be nice to know the load just to be sure. Either way, 1.1kw (3750 BTU/hr) is probably more than enough to cover the full design load of any one (or even two or three) of the five zones, if not the whole shebang, and is less than the minimum modulation of the smallest NextGen.

I'm not specifying an EMB-S-1, I'm just sayin'...










...the loads kinda matter when it comes to picking the right equipment, so run some numbers already, and be aggressive rather than conservative on the R-value assumptions, and don't forget plug load & occpancy BTUs. Most people aren't going to be spending the 99th percentile temperature hours in the basement, by themselves. Some lights & 1-2 mammalian bodies would likely be delivering a double-digit percentage of the design heat load in any one zone.