We're in the process of rehabbing one of the units we manage, and during teardown of the kitchen, we notice that on the wall behind where the sink and dishwasher were, was a hot water baseboard heater. We consulted with a couple HVAC guys and while they did advise that it wouldn't be too much of an issue because it's just "radiant heat", I wanted to see if anyone has seen something similar or encountered a situation like this?
What we'd like to avoid is drilling into the slab and dropping the hot water pipe under the floor, or re-working the plumbing and electric to change the kitchen layout to avoid anything on that wall. Our contractor is suggesting we leave a small gap of ~3" from the wall to where our cabinets and appliances would come, but our concern is that this would lead to food/water falling through the large crack and being hard to retrieve/clean.
The problem with brushing it off as "just radiant heat" is that the heat has nowhere to radiate to. It's trapped behind cabinets/dishwasher/under countertops (if I understand correctly). It's not as if the cabinets will conduct heat to the rest of the room. I bet if you asked your tenant they would say it gets pretty cold in the kitchen. Your best and only option may be to reroute the piping for the radiators. Do you have access to a crawl space? Where is the boiler located?