Best Of
Re: How to move forward with Heating in 1941 home in Queens, NY
But that would cost even more, and you would never see any return on your investment. Keep the steam.
There are a whole bunch of Steam Men in NYC, who can make your system run as well as hot-water for much less cost. Go here:
Re: Coaching required -
Just a side note, an easy way to find out the length of the loops would be to open each one up and blow the water out of it into a bucket and measure the amount you get. Look up the amount of water in 100ft of the installed tubing and that will get you close enough for what you want to know for balancing. When I put the first radiant floor tubing in my house I didn't record how long each loop was, I just know that none are over 300ft. I used the little flow meters on my manifold to check the flow when everything was wide open and then just throttled the higher flow zones to match the lowest zone.
You are getting good advice here, my gut feeling is you may have to add some panel radiators in the lowest performing rooms and bring them online when the floor performance is inadequate. With constant circulation already happening when the house won't stay up to temp you could put panel radiators on TRVs and not have to worry about separate thermostatic control. Sizing each individual radiator could be interesting although not impossible.
epmiller
Re: Service provider needed
If you can't find a guy or company from the site, you only need to find an open minded plumber who is willing to learn something new and we can get him & you through it. MadDog
Re: Propane Quality
has anyone checked your gas pressure at the boiler when it is trying to fire?
If regulators are 16 years old, I would suspect them.
JUGHNE
Re: Bosch vs. Viessmann Condensing Boiler for old home
@GW There are arguments for and against summer usage. The fuel use based heat load does not take into account solar gains, so it underestimates peak load. Solar gains in a normal house are not that high so about DHW energy use is probably comparable fudge factor.
If you are heating hot water with a high mass boiler in the summer, the summer time efficiency is extremely low so it over-estimates winter time gas contribution.
Wood heat can be added to the calculation, it is simply another source of BTU. The conversion from cords to wood to BTU into the house has fair bit error (efficiency of stove, quality of wood, quality of burn), so won't be that accurate. Still within ballpark though.
Keeping the thermostat a couple of degrees colder doesn't change the numbers that much when you are working with a 70F delta, nighttime setbacks don't change fuel use much either. Definitely don't use a month when you were away on vacation and the heat was turned down.
For any existing house with unknown construction details and air leakage, it would still be the most accurate boiler sizing. Certainty more accurate than even the best manual J. Won't work with something like an all glass MCM house, so not for every situation but a good check if within the ballpark though.
Kaos
Re: How to move forward with Heating in 1941 home in Queens, NY
Don't listen to your neighbor. Get the steam dialed in with correct piping and a new boiler (only if needed), proper venting, etc. and you will never consider replacing it. It's also probably the best type of heating for your child with Asthma.
Bcos17
Re: How to move forward with Heating in 1941 home in Queens, NY
According to my neighbor, who is a general contractor, replacing that with Hot water heating is a good idea.
You'll never see a return on investment.
pecmsg
Re: Turning off heat while not home
Don't set back when your heat pump has electric resistance heaters for the second stage.
To better understand how a heat pump works in numbers (hypothetical)
Electric heater with the resistance heat coils (like the red glow in a toaster) will make 3412 BTU per kilowatt of electricity,
if one kilowatt of electricity costs 20 cents then you will get a little over 17,000 for one dollar
$1.00 = 17,000 BTU. Electric Resistance Aux Heat
If your heat pump has a COP (coefficient of performance) of 3.0 then one dollar will purchase three times as much heat from your heat pump.
$1.00 = 51,000 BTU Heat Pump Compressor Heat.
If you turn off the compressor for 6 of the 8 hours that you're at work and your house needs 51,000 BTU per hour to stay warm for those 8 hours (based on the outdoor temperature that day) you would save about 6 dollars that day. Then at 3 PM your clock thermostat turns your heat back on to be warm for you at 5 pm when you get home from work. The heat pump would need to operate for two hours non stop to maintain 64° that would cost you $2.00 for 51,000 BTUh for 2 hours. (51,000 BTU will only maintain the temperature it will not increase the temperature on that particular day)
But you want 68° when you get home, so the auxiliary heat would also operate for some of that time in order to raise the temperature up to 68°. If your 5 kW auxiliary electric resistance heat were to operate for 2 hours in order to make that home 4 degrees warmer then you will be using $5.00 per hour to get another 85,000 BTU per hour from a 5 kW auxiliary heater to increase the temperature. That would cost you an additional $10.00 for the time the electric resistance heat is operating. Add the $2.00 to the $10.00 and you get $12.00 to NOT heat your home for 8 hours.
That is more than the $8.00 you would spend on heating your home with the heat pump alone. Of course the 5KW heat may not operate the entire 2 hours of the recovery time from 3:00 to 5:00PM But even if it only operated for one and a half hours you would still pay about $7.50 for that time. If your electric resistance heat ran for only one hour during the 2 hour recovery time you would pay $5.00 for that time, then you would save about $1.00 for NOT heating your home.
For the heat pump setback to save you any real money, you need to leave it off for more than 24 hours before you get a benefit from turning it off. If you are going on vacation and you want to leave the thermostat at 55° so the pipes don't freeze, that is a good idea. no need to keep the home at 68° for a week or two. But for only 8 hours, or less, there is no savings.
As I said at the beginning, the numbers are hypothetical, but there are occasions where it may cost you more to set the thermostat back a few degrees for short time periods. I have actually seen this happen where a customer wanted to know why they were not saving $$$ by turning the thermostat down at 8:00 AM then turning it back up at 2:00 PM when the kids got home from school. Only 6 hours and 2 of those 6 were doing recovery from the lower temperature to the regular temperature. Yea I actually cost them more $$$ to not heat the house.
Re: How to move forward with Heating in 1941 home in Queens, NY
Trading steam for hot water is often a losing proposition for the owner. You never recover the installation cost in fuel savings.
Tread carefully.
