Best Of
Re: Need help choosing between Comforto (Granby) and ThermoPride oil furnace
I don't know about Conforto. Thermopride is generally considered to be the best and most expensive oil furnace.
Your old one lasted 36 years that is a good run for an oil furnace. General rule of thumb is 20 years. You generally want as much return air as you can get it should not be restricted.
Re: J.P. Ward
The numbers just don't work to build factories in the US. Currently the labor department estimates 400,000 unfilled factory jobs in the US. They are looking for the same people as all the trades. Looks like we may be going in the wrong direction with entry level job workers these days. Farm workers, factory workers, construction labor, hospitality and food processors are leaving by the bus loads. A shiney new factory with no workers doesn't help much.
Modern factories to be accurate, fast and competitive will be automated. 65% of those jobs will require a degree. These are not low pay entry level jobs and wages. As such the cost of the product needs to cover those wages.
With a new pickup built in Mexico costing upwards 100 grand what would a truck 100% sourced and built in America cost?
Factory jobs, just like trade jobs, and farm jobs have a stigma of low wages, long hours, dirty, possibly unsafe conditions, etc. A major PR issue like our trade. How many people do you know applying for a factory job? Money motivates American workers these days, for the most part.
Farm land and factories are still being gobbled up by foreign investor group.
Uncertainty around tariffs, their %.
Raw material, partial assemblies will still come from across the globe, as the average US built car is 45% imported components.
Not a lot of discussion on how to over-come these obstacles?
There will be a lot of lip service and promises by manufacturers to build US factories, once they run the numbers on the costs involved to build a widget, even if the tax payers cover the cost of the factory build, in the US, not enough consumers are buyers. The stall is on.
China with its 1.4 billion people, a huge, low cost labor pool, started planing in the 1970s to become the worlds tool box and manufacturing powerhouse. They started with massive infrastructure investments.
Around here we barely have enough power to keep residential AC running on a hot day. Interstate grid lock every day. What happened to the 2018 focus on infrastructure improvements?
It starts with a realistic vision, then a pathway to get there. Our leaders, whichever party, just pinball from one problem to the next on a daily basis. Flavor of the day, what makes the headlines.
It would be nice to think someone, enough of us, are working in the background to get er done??
hot_rod
Re: Oil to propane, Kingston NY area - EDITED.
But, how many people actually get proper maintenance done?
It's the same basic principle that makes me favor probe-type low-water cutoffs on steam boilers as opposed to float-type. Folks tend to forget to blow the float-type ones down. Yes, probe units do need to be checked annually, but annually is not weekly.
ISTR @Mark Eatherton once ran a mod-con without maintaining it, just to see what would happen. Its efficiency dropped noticeably. I've forgotten how much, it's been quite a while.
Re: Oil to propane, Kingston NY area - EDITED.
I certainly have not forgotten. In fact, I support the decision to use CI due to the complexity of the mod-cons and the inability to find proper parts and service personnel.
I simply wish to prevent anyone from comparing a 92% mod-con to a 84% CI. This is not a fair comparison.
There are degreed engineers on this site that are doing exactly that and they do a disservice to all people who come here seeking advise.
I also wish for you to note that the mod-con will consume 869 Therms for the season vs. 1140 Therms for the CI boiler for the season on a house that uses 80M BTU for the season.
Figure $2.50 per therm and the annual savings is $677.00. An argument can be easily made that the mod-con can be maintained PROPERLY for less than this value, and, if maintained, it can last more than 10 years.
LRCCBJ
Re: New Propane Boiler Options
Thank you for the article you posted, @Kaos , these are all good things to explore. The example in that article presents a scenario requiring room air dehumidification when it was 90°F outside; this is much different scenario than operating a heat pump water heater in cold climates when outside air is cold and dry.
The ASHRAE article I referenced indicates that heating discharge air from a heat pump water heater is a possible solution as the air impacting a surface can cool it down below the dew point. This is not easy without an external source of heat. Although the discharge is localized, it is informative to see the following analysis on the impact of a heat pump water heater on a room the size of an entire home:
"The best-case scenario for installation in an enclosed space would be a closet the size of an entire house. …The HPWH would be able to extract about 6.2 kBTU of heat from the air (5.3 kBTU sensible + 0.9 kBTU latent). This is not enough heat for a single heating cycle in a typical 3 to 4-person household of this size. Furthermore, cooling indoor surfaces down near 45ºF for more than an hour, multiple times a day, carries a high risk of moisture damage and mold in most climate zones. If the air mass in a 1,625 ft² room does not contain enough energy to heat the water, neither will the air in a smaller room."
Roger
Roger
Re: New Propane Boiler Options
@Kaos , the controls have to be designed to allow stratification of the tank so that continuous cold water make up feeds the plate heat exchanger. The entire system has to be designed properly or you end up with lower performance and the boiler finishes hot which wastes energy (as it does with a conventional indirect tank and combo/instantaneous systems).
Regarding heat pump water heaters, the article indicates this is a common problem that has to be solved before widespread use of heat pump water heaters. This makes sense because the rooms (and outside walls) are chilled as part of normal operation. This introduces a new mold and condensation problem in the outside walls that did not exist before the heat pump water heater was installed. The authors identified the following issues:
- Inadequate heating capacity compared to advertised specifications.
- Real-world efficiency significantly lower than rated efficiency.
- Moisture-related damage and mold growth.
And believe the issues generally track back to two primary causes:
- Insufficient access to the thermal resources inside the building.
- Improper handling of cold exhaust air.
Roger
Roger
Re: New Propane Boiler Options
@Kaos , you’re spot on about micro zoning - it will keep the boiler idling and waste energy.
But the most efficient state for a boiler is when it’s off, so the best design is thermal purge so no energy is wasted at the end of each cycle. Properly designed indirect tanks with plate heat exchangers and thermal purge will exceed the efficiency of combi boiler water heating. Last month's ASHRAE journal also had an article that highlighted why heat pump water heaters have major issues (water damage and mold in enclosed spaces of outside walls due to cold discharge air), they operate at outputs and efficiencies far below their ratings (the rooms cool off and drop performance as there is no external heat source to feed it). Further, Vermont has relatively “cheap” residential electricity ($0.225/kWh recently) compared to the rest of New England, but that’s still $6/gal propane and $9/gal fuel oil equivalent so the cost to operate the heat pump water heater is more even without including the effective impact of running a small air conditioner in your home in the winter. Most of the boiler country in the US does not have comparatively inexpensive Canadian electricity prices found in some provinces you reference.
Roger
Roger
Re: Need help choosing between Comforto (Granby) and ThermoPride oil furnace
I sell quite a few Thermo Pride furnaces. They are hard to beat, and were recently acquired by Beckett, another industry leader in the oil market. I would personally inquire about the heat exchanger warranty, then have a startup analysis performed to make sure the new heat exchanger was not subject to excessive temperatures. Most of the oil highboys can be set up to be anywhere from 70,000 to 125,000 Btu input based on nozzle selection. If you are short on return air, the tech should just configure the furnace with a smaller nozzle, and adjust the fuel/air accordingly. Just my .02
Re: Torque Wrench
That's the only thing I used a torque wrench for was putting a CI boiler together. Lots of variables with a torque wrench. How you pull or push, lube etc those little thing can throw things off by a mile.