Heating

Rehabbing, Fix and Flip, Rental Properties
1

For the Midwest area where it gets cold, what is the cheapest, efficient heating for:

  1. A floor that will be lived on i.e. 1st Apartment
  2. For a basement with pipes to keep them warm

I was thinking about baseboard heating and forced air, but those are the only two I know.

Thank you.

2

We have a small apt building in IL. The units have baseboard heat. It’s pretty affordable. As long as you can get it wired in, the units themselves are really cheap. You can wrap the pipes in the basement to help out.

3

I do alot of rehab work for large affordable housing complexes.

So doing things cheap is the name of the game with their properties.

A few things to take into consideration. Is natural gas fuel available or are you going to need electric. Who’s paying the utility bill.

If you are paying the utility bills a common way they are heating apartment units is via one central furnace / boiler system with hot water piping to baseboard units in the apartments. The piping needs to be insulated. If not or if you dont want to open up the floors/walls to put in hot water pipes, self contained electric baseboard heating units can be installed. Just be cautious as they consume alot of energy.

Hot forced air units can be installed in each units via small units called magic packs go to www.magic-pak.com to read on them.

Other options include one main air handler with VAV’s - vairable air valves that open and close to let forced air from the central unit into the space as needed.

For your application I believe you are going to find the magic packs or baseboard as the most effecient cheapest method.

For the basement… just to keep pipes from freezing you can install electric baseboard or ceiling hung unit heaters. they come gas or electric fired. https://www.rezspec.com/catalog-egw.html