I'm building a new home with 3 floors. Each has radiant heating and forced air HVAC. The layout looks like this:
Basement: 3 radiant heating zones + 1 HV (no AC)
1st floor: 3 radiant heating zones + 1 HVAC 2nd floor: 4 radiant heating zones + 1 HVACI'm thinking about using a 2 stage thermostat for HVAC+radiant on the basement and 2nd floor, for a total of 11 thermostats:
Basement: 2x single stage (radiant) 1x two-stage thermostat (radiant + HV)
1st floor: 3x single stage thermostats (radiant) 1x single stage + 2 sensors (HVAC)2nd floor: 3x single stage thermostats (radiant) 1x two stage thermostat (radiant + HVAC)
It seemed like lot of thermostats, but apparently multiple zones with radiant heating is easy to do. The HVAC installer didn't feel comfortable with multiple zones, so there's a single HVAC system per floor (basement is just HV). This works since we won't be using AC much and the forced air heating primarily to assist the slower radiant heating.
We'd like to have some central control, so I'm considering AprilAire, Prolliphix, HAI, and RCS. Here's what I've gotten so far from reading the archives:
RCS: A little more complicated for our installers to wire because the RCS control units and network are located by the HVAC system and in our case, the locations are split between the basement and attic (HVAC), and garage (radiant).
Proliphix: Might be an overkill and the controllers are a bit expensive. Plus I don't read much about these. However, it does seem easy to wire.
HAI and AprilAire: Architecturally, these look very similar and seem like they would both work. The HAI looks a little homely, and the AprilAire is a little big.
Are my observations on target, and are there other options or considerations we should include in our decision?