New Build, In Slab Heating vs. Crawl Space – GreenBuildingAdvisor

Hello!

We are in the planning stages for our new home build this year and have been considering which GC to use. 

Our plans were engineered for a slab foundation, as we would like to take advantage of our South facing windows for passive solar gain. We also want to do radiant floors for our main heat source. Since we’re doing a slab, we felt that doing in slab hydronic made the most sense for efficiency.

However, our GC candidate has (last minute) told us we should do a crawl space for installing the hydronic heat and have the warm board act as the subfloor for ease of installation/maintenance. This would require re-engineering our plans as well as considering the benefits/costs of doing it this way.

Does it make sense to do a crawl space for hydronic heating instead? For reference, our property is at 9k feet elevation and can get pretty cold in winters, but still plenty of sun. 

We’re definitely leaning towards still doing in-slab heating with the required slab insulation below it, but wanted to hear your thoughts.

Thanks!