Who was the IDIOT who Decided That HOMES Are Force Air Heated?

It can also be built into concrete floors(radiant heat) and works beautifully.

My house has a small boiler for the heat. It is pretty efficient but takes a while to heat the house up at times.

yeh, why didn't we set up houses for wifi back in the 1800's
Radiant heating is what fireplaces did.

Hot air was easy to then develop from the invention of the Franklin stove. The heating pattern was merely a matter of installing VENTS and making RETURN VENTS along the edges of the heated rooms.
Then came central heating systems and forced air and steam heating and radiator (convection ) and then baseboard radiators.
radiant heating is ideal for new construction but it costs a fuckin fortune to retrofit

europeans started with the fireplace too, but ended up with hot water radiant heat. the reason i heard somewhere was that they dont generally do AC and doing both AC and heat makes forced air a lot cheaper since the same ductwork is used for both, but I dont fully buy this because Americans were using forced air rather than radiant heat before AC became common here. I also am not convinced that in new construction radiant heat would add a lot of cost...how much can running hot water pipes cost?

In the UK, about £4500 including the boiler.

Based on an average UK house with eight rooms and hall, stairs and landings.

Ten radiators, one boiler, all pipework hidden, three or four days work.

I'm available Tuesday week.

Me? I'd go for underfloor, geothermal heating system.

If I had two or three acres, of course.

depending on your water quality(many radiant systems are in rural and suburban areas where people have lrger lots)
The water delivery piping can clog up with scale or be etched by low pH. The quality of water is more an issue with these than even with baseboard hot water.

Earliest forced hot air as passive with the large vents and returns along the wall sides.

We built an addition a number of years ago and investigated putting radiant heating. It was quite prohibitive because we needed a separate ZONE controller and all the stuff that entailed , separate pumps and tank swith a bleed system to periodically change the water so it doesn't get all pookey.

It would have been better to do the entire house biut that would have added another amount that, at the time , didn't make sense.
Ive since gone gas baseboard (from an oil system) an, since the price decreases of gas, Ive never enjoyed better economics in my system.
BAseboard radiators are less techy than radiant but now they have individual feedbacks with flow reducers and temp sensors for an individual room so that the system can deliver more or less circulated hot water and keep the rooms nce and equally comfy.
That's a retrofitters dream.

I don't know of any geothermal systems that are radiant heating. All the systems Ive seen are forced "warm' air. You NEVER get toasty warm with geothermal. I don't care what any salesman tells you.

We use inhibitor here to stop limescale and keep the water non pookey, as you call it.
Small bottle, about a pint maybe a pint and a half, which costs about a fiver.
About once every two or three years we put in a small bottle of flush and fire up the system so it gets into all nooks and crannies, then drain it down.
Refill the system, pour in the inhibitor, bleed the radiators and you should be good for another two or three years.

The whole drain down, refill and bleed takes about a morning, and is pretty simple to do.

My brother has a system up and running in France, and his place is always too warm for my liking when I visit.
The system cost him an arm and a leg to install, but all he has to pay for now is the electricity used by the pump to move the water around the system.

Here is a similar UK set up...like I say, you need quite a bit of land and shouldn't get too upset when bloody great trenches are dug http://www.iceenergy.co.uk/Renewable-Energy/Heat-Pumps/Ground-Source-Heat-Pumps?gclid=CLCCkYzAl7sCFfHMtAodBBYAAQ

AHHHH, those are the "Original" geothermal systems where the source well would be pumped and run through a heat exchanger and then the water is dumped into a pond where its allowed to infiltrate. We don't use those kinds of systems anymore (Anyway they were always forced air for the reasons Hawkeye stated---the heating system would also become the COOLING sytem in summer)
The old fashioned systems would use abou 2gpm of water per TON of heating. In US, unless you live on a farm, all the geothermal systems are now "closed loop" where a circle of PVC pipe carries a het exchange liquid (usually a glycol) and the "loop well" goes down to less than 4oo feet (Its about 50 feet per ton) That's not really enough and closed loop systems are less able to deliver a toasty heat.
Also, in marginal areas, where we have actual winters, geothermal systems are almost useless without a costly backup electric resistance het pump.
The best heat for new construction would be a radiant heat fired by gas. For retrofit a gas furnace with multi zone and "mart" baseboard radiators.
In our studio building weve put in those wall mounted radiators that heat vertically from the floor to about 3 feet . I saw these in Ireland.(everybody ued to use em to dry towels and that kept humidity in the room)

does forced air have the plus that the air gets filtered? I am thinking that the filter is for the furnaces benefit more than ours.

re my complaint we can put a humidifier into the system but last I looked it as about $1k extra cost. not to mention that i have never seen a humidifier that did not need regular attention re cleaning because of water deposits and mold/bacteria.

yeh, filters are "add ons" with pricey gizmos.
The problem with many forced air systems is that they don't have the right return capacity so upstairs can miss getting heat.
many filters have multi layers so they don't "choke up like HEPA filters do when thy aren't changed frequently. I never liked forced air just because it was usually dirty. (Imagine coal hot air). The house that my grndparents had was coal with huge floor vents in which we used to fish for " treasure" my granddad would throw a silver dollar or two and wed go fishing for em with balls of balsam on weights so the silver dollar could be picked up like it was glued. but we hadda be gentle