Does anyone have radiant flooring?? Where do you have it?? Is it expensive to install? Run? How durable is it? Can you have it in a kitchen with wood floors?? Do you have to worry about kids playing rough on it ( my boys bike, rollerblade, play hockey in our kitchen. I am replacing our floors and I want to put wood floors and maybe radiant heating. I have a large kitchen/great room combo. Can it help cut heating costs?? Does it use water to heat? Do I have to worry about leaks?? Thanks for the input.
We have radient heat - ours is filled with hot water, heated by a boiler, and encased in a cement slab. It is a closed system, meaning that new water never gets added, the same water just recirculates. Ours has anti-freeze added to it, since we have very cold winters.
We installed it ourselves, since we built our own house. It was a wee bit more expensive to install than a traditional forced air system, but not too bad. I find that, efficiency-wise, it is comparable or maybe a bit cheaper than other heating systems. As novices, I can say that it was a royal PITA to install ourselves!! I have pictures of the process, if you are interested.
In our house, we have laminate "wood" floors in most of the house, and ceramic tile in the bathrooms, kitchen, and laundry room. It works equally well under both of these. We have found, however, that the grout around our tiles is cracking, and that this may be caused by too much heat directly under the grout.
It isn't an "instant gratification" heat source, as mentioned above. If the house is cold and the heat is turned down, and then you turn it up, it does take a while to heat up that huge concrete slab and warm the house. We have found two things that help with this. First, DO NOT turn the heat way down while you are gone. Keep it at a steady heat setting all the time. If you want to decrease the heat while you are gone buy a programmable thermostat and set it to start re-heating about an hour before you will be coming home. Secondly, we have a temperature sensor on the outside of our house. If the outside temperature drops suddenly, the sensor sends a message to the boiler to start pre-heating the water, so when the heat kicks on the hot water is ready to go.
The other thing I would caution you about is heat loss. You absolutely MUST insulate well under your heating coils. You also must insulate well anywhere the heat could try to escape, i.e. through outside walls or into unheated areas such as a garage. In a slab, you will lose a lot of heat to the ground around it unless you insulate your slab well... we used foam core board with a very high R-value all the way around ours. If you have the radient coils in the floor above a basement or crawl space, you must insulate well under the coils or you will lose a lot of your heat downwards as well.
All that said, we love our heat system. There is nothing better than getting out of bed or out of the shower and not having to step on cold floors.
Edited to add: Now worries about leaks either, unless you drill or screw something into the floor and poke into a coil. Something you have to be very very careful of during the construction process (the stories I could tell....) but not a big worry otherwise.
That being said, I have 3 dogs, 3 kids and wood floors. 
I doubt that you could put radiant heating under wood floors too, because wood's combustible, I may be wrong though. 
