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radiant heat in floor tube stuff
I have hot water floor heat in the slab of my garage. It is run with a boiler however. I expect that the boiler is more efficient at heating up a continued stream of water while the hot water heater is better at maintaining a reservoir of ready hot water.
I do have "instant" hot water in my house. This is done with a circulating loop and pump as you describe. One thing that I have noticed with this setup is the wide temperature range between where the hot water heater kicks on and where it kicks off. This loop also has a solar water heating panel on the roof to recover some of the heat lost during the circulation process, but it does not seem to be all that effective. I am not sure that the panel is installed correctly.
I don't ever use hot water floor heat in a shop building, because I tend to drill into the slab and anchor heavy equipment and so forth. Drilling into one of those water lines would really ruin your whole day.
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radiant heat in floor tube stuff
There is no problem with mounting the coil at an angle. Freon air conditioners often use an "A" shape coil to get more heat exchanger in the ductwork. It works fine.
I guess that if I was wanting to heat the garage, I would not use a coil around the stovepipe. It is just stealing heat that would otherwise go into the dwelling and routing it via a lossy medium to another space. There could be a whole host of other good reasons to use the liquid transfer loop, but efficiency is probably not one of them unless the place where the coil is connected is outside of the heated space for the wood stove.
I am building a new shop right now and I am planning to use a wood pellet stove. I can leave it set to a fairly low level when I am not there. My current shop (at my old house) has a natural gas furnace hung from the ceiling. I like the ceiling mounted furnace, but I don't have access to natural gas at the new place and I don't want to put in a second propane tank.
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radiant heat in floor tube stuff
Where I grew up in Missouri, we raised corn primarily as feed for our livestock. If I was still back there, using corn as a fuel would make a lot of sense. Here in NM, they don't grow much corn and it is expensive by comparison. Wood pellets are common here. I expect that most of our heating fuel is going to be more expensive, although our winters are shorter and milder. I use propane at the house for heating, but the new shop is about 400 ft from the house.
I am open to suggestions on my shop heating. Some have suggested solar options since we get so much sunshine, but the payback still tends to be very long (~15-20 yrs). I have not bought the wood pellet stove yet, and since it is starting to warm up, I probably can wait till next season.
As a final fallback, I can always put another propane tank in the ground. But I was using about $400 worth of propane per month during the coldest part of the winter this past year. Prices are high and since this is a petroleum product, I don't expect the prices to get better, soon. So, for the new construction I was looking for something entirely different. Cut and split firewood runs about $150 per cord delivered here. I live in pretty rugged desert terrain. The only trees are the ones that I plant, water, and protect from insects.
Murf, I understand the thinking about the wood stove and the liquid loop. It makes sense to only tend one fire.
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radiant heat in floor tube stuff
I think eastern Colorado and most of Kansas is wheat. I am sure that they plant corn, too, but I don't have any idea what the percentage is. When you get up through KS into Nebraska, corn starts to become the more dominant crop.
Let me ask a couple of questions in response to your most recent post.
Since wood pellets and corn are roughly the same size, will any wood pellet stove work with corn? I imagine that wheat would burn well too, but corn has more oil, so I expect that the BTU value is better.
What type of furnace is required to burn spent motor oil? I found one company called Clean Burn that makes a waste oil boiler that I might be able to use to heat my house and shop with waste oil. I called a local recycler and they can supply 1000 gallon lots for 60 cents per gallon. I think that I may need to look into this further.
I am not sure about the EPA. It is funny here. Across the county line (five miles from where I live) they regulate when you can burn wood in your fireplace. They literally have "No burn" days. Now in the county where I live, we can burn anytime. In the other county, they limit your ability to drill a well into the aquifer. Here you put up a house and drill a well for your needs. I am sure that the other county has made the provisions so that smoke from my county does not drift into their airspace on the "no burn" days and that the water that I use from my well is physically isolated in the underground aquifer from the water in their county. 
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