Best Of
Re: Normal boiler therm usage?
While you are looking for heat losses — be very suspicious of the fancy new windows. Poor installation can cause them to leak like sieves.
Re: Air to water heat pump system design
R-290 and R-600 ARE legal in refrigeration just restricted to no more then 5 or 6 oz total charge.
pecmsg
Re: Air to water heat pump system design
R290 refrigerant, for those who haven't read the data sheet, is just a very highly refined propane. It is a good refrigerant — it has some very desirable properties from that standpoint. Unhappily, it also happens to be highly flammable as well. In fact, a somewhat cheaper and less refined version is sold as "LP gas" as a fuel. It forms explosive mixtures with air over a remarkably wide range of concentrations.
A minor detail, perhaps.
There is another aspect to this discussion, however, and I must apologise to @Erin Holohan Haskell in advance here, and ask her to either edit this or take it down, if she feels it's out of line. That aspect is economic, and can be seen both in the resistance in much of the US and Canada to the idea of air to water or air heat pumps, but perhaps even more dramatically in Europe, where regulators and government have more power to attempt to force change. The plain fact is that a substantial minority — if not indeed a majority — of the population simply can't afford to make the necessary upgrades in their housing to make use of heat pumps even remotely feasible, nor can they afford to purchase a heat pump system if they could. The money simply isn't there. As has been seen in Europe (particularly the UK), if people are forced to stop using their old fossil (or wood) fueled heating systems, they will simply be cold.
If I consider my own parish and the region in which it is located, I estimate that no more than one in four of the houses and other housing units in the area could be heated adequately with a heat pump only without major upgrades to the house or unit (and that may be optimistic) and I am quite certain that no more than a fifth of the population could afford to do the upgrades and install a heat pump — even with the government subsidies.
Mind you, I am not opposed to heat pumps. There is one in an apartment where I live and it takes the edge off the cold for the lady who lives there (Cedric does most of the work, though). In their place, for those who can afford them, they are a very good way to provide heat (and cooling!) and comfort. For those who can't, they are in the same class as filet mignon, vacations in Spain, BMWs and Lexus cars, and so on. Either nice to look at or a source of anxiety and fury, depending on the situation.
Re: 30 year old boiler losing lots of water?
Bluntly, that is more water use than it should be — half a gallon a day is excessive.
It might be a leak in the boiler, likely above the water line; if so, on a cold day, you may see steam clouds from the exhaust. Take a look.
However, it might just be cumulative steam leaks all over the system. While it is excessive, keep in mind that just one drip every ten seconds somewhere is two gallons of water per day — four times what you are seeing. The most likely culprits are the valves on the radiators; the packing often gets tired and leaks small amounts of steam which aren't visible. Another likely spot is the radiator vents, if this is one pipe steam. They also can get tired and leak small amounts (or sometimes copious amounts!) of steam.
Start looking there.
Re: What saying or quote sticks with you since you were a newbie?
My old foreman told me this and it has prevented some nasty if not fatal occurences:
Remember just because some dumb sob says the valves closed check yourself don't trust other people's crap with your life.
Re: Need more consistent domestic hot water
Sounds great!! Can't maintain temp, requires lots of maintenance, low flow, and prone to scale! Who wouldn't want that?
@Jon Held_2 I think your fear of standalone water heaters is being too heavily biased by one bad event. If you put one in you won't even have to think about it for 10 years, how is that not attractive?
Re: EDR Calculation Questions
Can't think what you overlooked — and it does sometimes happen that the boiler is orrectly sized to the radiators!
Re: Used Diesel While We Wait for Delivery = Black Smoke
so much?
I just had a 200A federal pacific panel replaced by a licensed electrician (with me as his helper) for barely four figures parts/labor. If you mean with the whole heating system then 👍
We also Installed a tankless water heater as part of the deal…not parts, just electrical connect
TKPK
Re: Many years of issues with radiant floor heat.
I sincerely can't wrap my head around how Radiantec is still in business. I've seen literal hundreds of their systems and at least 75% of them have been less than satisfactory. They put on a good show by giving you all the paperwork and "calculations", but they're always wrong. I feel like it'd be easier just to do it correctly, but I suppose then they'd lose their proprietary nature.
As a side note, whoever installed this new boiler for you piped it wrong so that's probably not helping matters either. Is the boiler set to 140* or are the zones actually seeing 140*?
GroundUp
Re: Air to water heat pump system design
Where you get 1.5 to 1.1 from? Floor heat needs 100F or so, my AWHP does a COP higher than 2 any time above 10F, some of the r290s would be closer to 3. Very few places spend much of the heating season bellow 10F.
Kaos