Toe Kick Under Kitchen Counter Electric Heater

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Chuck B

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Hi! The layout of my small cottage kitchen makes for a large area not serviced by an electric baseboard heater. Any suggestions regarding the install and usage of an under cabinet toe kick area electric heater. Have been told that the heat might be uncomfortable standing at the sink? True? Please suggest brands. Thanks, Chuck
 

Chuck B

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Did you ever install one of those toe kick heaters as I'm thinking about it too.


Sorry for delayed reply jd!

Yep I installed a Cadet brand 1000 watt, 240v toe kick heater in my kitchen in a small cottage up in northern Michigan. I ran an armored cable from a metal box in the wall underneath the cabinet. It along with two other baseboard Cadet brand heaters are controlled by a wall thermostat. I have had them in a sunroom in my home and they have worked flawlessly for 25 years.

The heaters are available special order through Home Depot. The toe kick heater was the only possibility for warm in the kitchen and worked out fine!

Cadet consumer line is staffed by very knowledgeable and helpful text by the way.

By the way I installed it on a Lazy Susan cabinet so it's a 45° angle to the kitchen. It's not wise to install it under the sink base as it will fry your feet when you're standing at the sink.

Hope this helps.

 

JDkimes

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Sorry for delayed reply jd!

Yep I installed a Cadet brand 1000 watt, 240v toe kick heater in my kitchen in a small cottage up in northern Michigan. I ran an armored cable from a metal box in the wall underneath the cabinet. It along with two other baseboard Cadet brand heaters are controlled by a wall thermostat. I have had them in a sunroom in my home and they have worked flawlessly for 25 years.

The heaters are available special order through Home Depot. The toe kick heater was the only possibility for warm in the kitchen and worked out fine!

Cadet consumer line is staffed by very knowledgeable and helpful text by the way.

By the way I installed it on a Lazy Susan cabinet so it's a 45° angle to the kitchen. It's not wise to install it under the sink base as it will fry your feet when you're standing at the sink.

Hope this helps.

Great thanks! My project is slightly different because I'm using the hydronic heat system. The temperatures of the hot water are a bit lower so I may put it in the cabinet under the sink. At least partly because that will be easier for me…
 

Dana

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If you have a hydronic heating system, why not replace the electric baseboards &/or put some radiant floor in the corner you think isn't well served by the electric baseboards?

Toe kick heaters are noisy and drafty, the crummiest of last chance "Hail Mary" shots when there simply are no other options. Even fin-tube baseboard is superior from a comfort & reliability point of view. Cast iron baseboard or low temp panel radiators are better still.

Getting to the optimal heating solution starts with a Manual-J or I=B=R type heat load calculation for each room on the zone you're heating. How do you know how much toe-kick heater to buy, if that ends up being the solution? A: DO THE MATH FIRST! (At least the crayon-on-wall math) Be aggressive/optimistic rather than conservative/pessimistic on air leakage assumptions to avoid oversizing (either the radiation or the boiler.)

If it's a micro-zone there are other factors to consider too, such as the minimum modulated output of the boiler, etc.
 

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I removed the interior walls, took
Out the living room kitchen and dining room walls so there's literally no walls to put a baseboard or radiator in. The kitchen "wall" is all cabinets. The radiant floor system would be great but costs thousands from the estimates I've had, and that's just the materials. The hydronic toekick is about the only option I can afford given my current kitchen/heating system.
 

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I removed the interior walls, took
Out the living room kitchen and dining room walls so there's literally no walls to put a baseboard or radiator in. The kitchen "wall" is all cabinets. The radiant floor system would be great but costs thousands from the estimates I've had, and that's just the materials. The hydronic toekick is about the only option I can afford given my current kitchen/heating system.
I should add that the baseboard heater that was there was 5 ft long, 3/4" copper pipe, 190 F max, guessing it's a 1 gpm although the pump, boiler, zone valves don't say. So thinking that's probably ~3000-4000 but/hr, so the Mason Whispa iii should be good for the heat I need and is rated very quiet.
 
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Dana

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The original baseboard may have been overkill for the actual load. (usually is, by 2x). Measuring the baseboard is a downright lousy way of estimating the design heat load, even worse than stupid-on-a-stick "BTUs per square foot" rules of thumb. Your real heat load for that room/area is almost certainly under 3000 BTU/hr, and could easily be half that. (Reality is probably is about half, using experience as a guide.)

If you want to go there on a dumb rule of thumb, (and I DON'T recommend it) a not too drafty 2x4 framed insulated house in Littleton with clear glass double panes would typically come in at about 14-16 BTU/hr per square foot of conditioned space, a 2x6 framed house with low-E double panes 10-12 BTU/hr per square foot of conditioned space.

If you have a heating history on your house you can run a fuel-use based load calculation, and if the temperature balance room to room has been reasonable, use the proportional baseboard lengths to come up with the proportional heat load for the area you're looking to heat.

If the joist bays under the floor are open and accessible, suspended tube radiant with your higher temp water is cheap and DIY-able, and a lot nicer. (An engineer should be able to do the napkin math on that without losing brain cells. :) )
 

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The original baseboard may have been overkill for the actual load. (usually is, by 2x). Measuring the baseboard is a downright lousy way of estimating the design heat load, even worse than stupid-on-a-stick "BTUs per square foot" rules of thumb. Your real heat load for that room/area is almost certainly under 3000 BTU/hr, and could easily be half that. (Reality is probably is about half, using experience as a guide.)

If you want to go there on a dumb rule of thumb, (and I DON'T recommend it) a not too drafty 2x4 framed insulated house in Littleton with clear glass double panes would typically come in at about 14-16 BTU/hr per square foot of conditioned space, a 2x6 framed house with low-E double panes 10-12 BTU/hr per square foot of conditioned space.

If you have a heating history on your house you can run a fuel-use based load calculation, and if the temperature balance room to room has been reasonable, use the proportional baseboard lengths to come up with the proportional heat load for the area you're looking to heat.

If the joist bays under the floor are open and accessible, suspended tube radiant with your higher temp water is cheap and DIY-able, and a lot nicer. (An engineer should be able to do the napkin math on that without losing brain cells. :) )

If you're saying I could attach some 1/2" PEX to my existing piping where the previous baseboard was and run it back and forth with some type insulation product holding it up against the subfloor below, I'm up for that!
 

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Try designing rather than hacking.

Start with figuring out the heat load, and the available floor area not covered by cabinets and appliances, and come up with a BTU/hr per square foot ratio.

Suspended tube at 150-180F isn't putting out nearly as much as a 140F staple-up, but with a low enough load per square foot you may still get there with no heat exchangers.

If you have to go there, finned convective heat exchangers on the tubing the per square foot output can still be pretty good (25-40 BTU/hr per square foot with 180F water under typical hardwood floor stackups) if it turns out you need. But it's better to figure that out BEFORE you install the tubing, since it would be done differently using a the Ultra Fin approach (different spacing, stand-off height, less tubing.) Suspended tube often calls for 8" o.c. tube spacing, two tubes per joist bay. A finned tube approach uses one tube per bay, or running the tubing perpendicular to the joists. It's cheap stuff- ~$1.40 per fin / $2.8o pwer pin pair, (sold in packs of 100, which is 50 pairs), so there's no reason to shy away from it. A quickie overview vidi lives here.

Do the math, including the pumping head on the whole zone (including) if it's going to be more than 100' of half inch PEX. The PEX may need to be split into 2-3 same-length loops on manifolds or design in a monoflow-tee bypass branch.

With any type of under-subfloor radiant the response time can be pretty slow, so deep overnight setbacks need to be adjusted to start the heating-up at least an hour or two before you're going to use the rooms, but it makes of pretty cushy-comfy barefoot winter morning coffee making as long as the recovery ramp starts soon enough to get the floor warm, even if the room temp is still lagging a bit.
 

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I think the Ultra Fin might be exactly what I need.
I'm really not sure how I'd figure out the heat load...but the previous baseboard heated kitchen was 12x12. Again all the walls are gone now and the old entry hall, living room and dining room still have the original baseboard heat on their exterior walls. So 144 sq ft, but much of that is cabinets and and island. Nonetheless, 144 sq ft x 30 btu/hr per sq ft is about 4,000 btu/hr. Reality is much less than that I'm guessing. But I'd think just hooking it into where the old radiator was using the monoflow 3/4 x 3/4 x 1/2 and the ultra fin parallel in joists on 24" centers (maybe skip under island and cabinets) will be plenty of heat.
I can't get their Ultra-calc heat calculator to download/work.
 

Dana

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To figure out how to estimate the heat load, use the links I've provided in prior posts:

"Getting to the optimal heating solution starts with a Manual-J or I=B=R type heat load calculation for each room on the zone you're heating."

"If you have a heating history on your house you can run a fuel-use based load calculation, and if the temperature balance room to room has been reasonable, use the proportional baseboard lengths to come up with the proportional heat load for the area you're looking to heat."

If you need a bit of hand-holding walking you through an I=B=R or fuel-use based load calc I can work through some of the details- give it a shot! To figure out a reasonable U-factor for the walls or windows we'll need more information.

A load of 30 BTU/hr per square foot of ROOM would be a house with single pane windows, no wall insulation, and R13-R19 in the ceiling. But the amount of available radiant floor area in a kitchen is substantially less than the room size, since much of it is covered with cabinets & appliances.

I've never used their online tools, but expect them to be pretty crummy. An I=B=R load calculation on the construction type is good enough if done carefully- it'll usually overestimate reality, but not by 2x.

Again, the size of the prior baseboard or the size of the room is pretty irrelevant for determining heat load. The baseboard size & type is only relevant for keeping the temperature balance between rooms on the same zone about the same.
 

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FWIW: I just downloaded, installed & started the UltraCalc 2.0 tool on a Win-Doze ten machine. The read-me file said it should work on Win98 or newer uSoft systems. I expect under the hood it's just a dumb I=B=R spreadsheet, but I'm not going to be spending any time on it right now.
 

JDkimes

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So my load is closer to 20 BTU/hr per square for the whole house... so for 144 sq ft kitchen ... <3,000
But not sure how this helps me figure out anything w/ the UltraFin system.
 

Dana

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How did you derive the 20BTU/ft number for the whole house?

The load isn't proportional to the square footage of the room (not all rooms have the same amount of exterior surface per square foot of floor area), but if the room to room temperature balance has been pretty good, it's roughly proportional to the baseboard lengths.
 

Dana

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That sounds credible, but a bit to the high side for a reasonably tight 2x4 framed house with double panes and insulated basement walls. There may be some low-hanging fruit on the air sealing front.

If the walls are gutted and still open it's an opportunity moment for caulking the framing to the sheathing inside every stud bay with polyurethane caulk, as well as a bead between doubled-up top plates and where the bottom plate meets the subfloor, etc. If the fouindation walls & band joists aren't insulated that could make the difference. Tighter 2x4 framed houses typically come in ~15 BTU/hr per square foot for the whole house, give or take, but there are a lot of particulars that can move it up or down a couple of BTU (lots of windows vs. less than typical amount of window area or better-than-code windows, etc.)
 
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