In the spring of 2014 I finished the wooden covers for the hydronic baseboard heat in my studio barn. The design was mine, but my friend, Randy Patterson, did the lion’s share of the work and wrote an On The Job article about the covers that appeared in the April 2014 issue of JLC. I’d gotten the original idea from some wooden baseboard covers that a friend in Michigan had shown me. His were elaborate, furniture quality, stain-grade covers, but he had much more skill and patience than I do. My design used simple blocks and standard width 1x5 boards.
And speaking of heat—that article seemed to catch it from a number of corners: “You can’t use wood with finned heating elements; The wood will crack; The covers are too big; The holding brackets won’t work; They will be noisy, etc.” Well, here we are four years and three full winters later (including a couple of real doozies), and those covers have performed beautifully. They are quiet and have worked perfectly keeping the studio wonderfully warm with no cracks and no noticeable increases in my gas usage from past years.
I left those heater covers unfinished to match the rustic barn interior, but at the end of the article we mentioned that the wood could be finished to match any home’s interior. Fast forward to December 2018. I needed to install new wood flooring in the living room of my home, and I decided to replace the ugly old baseboard covers with wood covers using the same design that we used for the barn. All the trim in the house is painted, so this time around I made all the parts out of primed pine. I made the 5/4 base blocks from scrap that I had on hand, and I actually had the forethought of painting them with primer and two coats of finish before installing them. I would not have to test my shaky hands cutting in the paint to the new floor.
The living room covers seemed to go together more easily than those in the studio barn—maybe because it was the second go round. I put two coats of finish paint over the factory primer and they look terrific. The primed wood turned out to be about half the cost of replacing the metal units, but to be fair, the metal units would most likely have gone in more quickly, so cost wise it was probably a wash. But I think the wood covers look so much classier than the metal. In fact, the reps from the outfit that installed my new boiler last year loved the covers in the barn so much that they took pictures to show clients an alternative to metal baseboard covers.
I need to caution readers that this design is solely for hydronic baseboard heat where combustibility is not an issue. Use only metal covers for electric baseboard heat.
How will the assembly hold up? As with the barn, only time will tell, but I’m confident. So far the house has stayed toasty, but in the meantime, I’m braced for the assault from the naysayers out there.
