Not that I have ever seen or heard of.

No radiant cooling. If you think about it, you would have a condensation mess. If you use radiant heat, you would still install ductwork for air conditioning. The benefit of radiant heat in the floor are many, especially in colder climates. The consideration is not how you cool, but your choice of heat. If money were no object, hands down I'd choose radiant heat over furnace heat every single time. No contest. They are also using solar panels to heat the water for radiant heat so it will become an alternative method - much more efficient that furnace heat.

Yes there is radiant cooling.

Suggest you search via Google for lots of info.

Air conditioning is "conditioning", not just cooling. Wouldn't radiant cooling turn your flooring into a refrigerator?

Interesting articles on radiant cooling:

http://www.healthyheating.com/Page%2055/Page_55_i_cooling_eq.htm#.V1HZV8mDTqA

Relative humidity looks to be a crucial factor in all of this.

Thanks for the post, Sandra. I would have guessed there is no such thing, but there is. Although I have been in many caves and tunnels and they are cool and not all have condensation either. You just helped me answer that question, lol.

The Bangkok Airport is fascinating in the article.

Cheers!

Thanks all for the correction. I have lived always near major rivers and now near the Mississippi River - so the relative humidity is always HIGH during warm months. If you live in an arid part of the world it would make sense that it could work. That however is not the case for 95% of the population of the US. So the question for the poster do you live in the desert or other part of the US with high heat and no humidity?

I used to wonder why a house with radiators couldn't be cooled by running cold water through them, instead of requiring a completely separate forced air system (e.g. Spacepak).

The reason is basic thermodynamics: You can only 'project' or 'radiate' heat, you can't 'radiate' or 'project' cold (without the use of air movement). So even an ice-cold radiator (or ice-cold radiant floor) can't cool a room by itself. (Although an ice-cold radiant floor would certainly freeze your feet!)

As a metaphor, think of heat as light, and darkness as cold. We all know you can only 'project' light, you can't 'project' darkness. Heat works the same way.

Cooling works very effectively with cool fluid flowing through pipes in things like vehicle engines, power station generators, nuclear reaction cores, etc., but why anyone would seriously consider its use in the home in most circumstances, is lost on me. (It's utilizing conduction mainly, but bear with me.) As Home Reborn mentions, the cooling and heating process is the movement of energy in the form of heat. To cool something, you are removing energy. To heat something, you are adding energy. Heat energy transfers in three ways: convection, conduction and radiation and how efficiently it does this is a function partly of delta T, or difference in temperature. To add heat to a room, you can take advantage of a small, concentrated high energy source and disperse the energy through radiation, convection and conduction. To cool a room, you have to take a large volume of air and run it past a concentrated, low energy plate and extract the heat by really the only method that is effective: conduction (ie. HVAC coils). To try and do this with radiation and convection at small delta T can be done if you try really, really hard, but it's ridiculously expensive, highly inefficient and ineffective, grossly impractical and bordering on insane for the intended result while creating a maintenance nightmare and wasting an incredible amount of money. You are far, far better off investing your money in trying to avoid the room becoming hot in the first place (a cave) with good building techniques and effective insulation and utilizing an off-the-shelf HVAC system designed by professional engineers who know what they are doing.

@Solar--thanks for the great explanation! I was trying to get the gist from Chemistry. As soon as you mentioned Delta T, yeah, it clicked in a bit more.

The gas laws would come into play, essentially. And it was great to have the cave confirmed!

The thing that used to baffle me as a kid was when my Mom used to keep all the doors and windows closed (and the blinds) on hot days. I'd want to open a window and she'd scold me. She would turn on a fan instead. At night we would do the opposite.

Considering we didn't have AC, our house was pretty cool. She also taught me the trick of a damp washcloth on the back of my neck when it's hot. She was my first teacher about heating and cooling. Lol.

One of our neighbours is building this crazy huge house with some sort of complicated heating and cooling system. It's going to be a test home. The guy is a builder.

I wish I could remember the name of it, but the house is built like a bunker out of these "Lego" block-type things. It's taken them a couple years to build, and their shop at the bottom looks like you could practically fly a plane into it. It's interesting.

I miss my Dad for talking about stuff like this. He'd find these types of discussions interesting.

:-)

Okay then, here's another few questions. Why can't there be an upright chest freezer with the individually coiled shelves that is frost free? Why are they all manual defrost?

What essentially is the component for the frost-free aspect? And was Freon that former component, but now replaced with x?

Another question---why couldn't ocean water be used to cool large buildings? The pipes would corrode too fast or? Because salt and ice is handy for making ice cream ;-)

You can definitely do hydronic cooling. It is becoming increasingly popular, and we are actually asked more and more about it every year. As others have mentioned, it is more complicated than heating due to humidity, condensation,etc – but it is done. Here is a writeup from a client who installs radiant cooling in Toronto. Andhere is a project in Great Falls Montana that uses radiant heating and radiant cooling. If you would like to talk in further details, give us a call.

@luvourhome Because if you're freezing that much stuff, you probably want to keep it for a while, and the "defrost cycle" is really just heating the freezer enough to sublime the ice off the shelves, which is what gives all your stuff "freezer burn" (it's basically been nearly defrosted over and over and desicated along the way, yuck). Probably a heating element could be added, but that's just... ruining the thing.

@acm--makes sense about defrost. Thanks. I over-thought it. Could have figured it out from thinking about my old car with the painfully slow defroster, lol.

:-)

And freezer-burned food is awful.

actually, it seems it exists and is totally awesome: https://positiveenergy.pro/building-science-blog/2017/4/24/texas-first-radiant-cooling-heating-system