Best Of

Ok - more info:

Yes! I did in fact adjust the boiler's controls when the old coil was taken out of service. That's when the Resideo electronic unit went in. It's set purely for heating, no temperature maintaining. Oil use sure dropped a bit. The local oil guy did a service, and that helped too. Unit hadn't been cleaned in 4 years.

The walkway is short - but annoying enough to deal with that it justifies getting melted. I'm aware of the need for a heat exchanger and antifreeze. Since it's being formed out, I figured the cost of at least prepping it for heat now, is low enough to justify just putting the pipes in. It's a 3 ft wide, 20ft (if that) long, with a bit of a square spot by the patio. Obviously not running all the time, just for snow. I think I have a Watts book on design guidelines here somewhere.

I expect to do the family room first (virtually no electric wiring under it, so easy access, and easy to get insulation under the piping.) then changeover the rest of the house. The boiler is oversized, and even with a smaller nozzle, tends to run shorter cycles than what I think is ideal. (it fires maybe 3-5 minutes while running and pumps the rest of the time). This got a bit worse after I started insulating all the basement pipes. Nothing had insulation on it. The prior homeowner tried to 'help' the kitchen's lack of heat by putting a run of baseboard under the floor. 🙄

FWIW, I'm just outside of Catawissa, PA. The previous owner of the property was apparently somewhat well known, and quite a character, from the stories I've heard…

@nasadowsk said: "Domestic water was a coil, but now is a heat pump hot water heater."

I believe this to mean that the oil fired boiler was/is equipped with tankless coil. Many of my customers have had heaters like this and have switched the DHW to gas. electric or other DHW source. Out of all those customers, only a small percentage of the plumbers that installed the new DHW system knew to fix the tankless coil control on the oil fired boiler system to stop making priority hot water for a coil that is not being used. YES I'm saying the the oil fired boiler thinks it is still making DHW and will waste fuel trying to make hot water that will never be used.

If this is the case with your oil fired Crown boiler, then I can save you about 5% to 10% on your fuel usage by making some minor adjustments on the oil burner control that is currently operating your oil burner and circulator pump(s). Ask me how!

I use anthracite coal for radiant, it's a great match. I wouldn't want to pay to melt sidewalks with oil though. Sheesh. I pay the equivalent to 88 cents a gallon when comparing btu to BTU. And it would be expensive even for me. It's like three to five times the heat requirement compared to your house per square foot. I can see a very small pad maybe, there are also different classes of snow melt systems, those which keep it dry take a lot of BTUs. Great questions, keep them coming.

Radiant can be more efficient since your system temps can be a lot lower. You may have to run through a mixing valve if you still want to run the baseboards at full temp, the fact you don't have a tank less coil could greatly enable you to keep system temps lower.

@nasadowsk , where in semi-rural PA are you located? We might know someone………..

If radiant is a no-go for whatever reason, my second choice would be cast-iron baseboard. It transmits heat by radiation as well as convection, increasing comfort.

sounds like a good Sargent!

The one the gangbanger is beating his girlfriend.

The construction site job where the guys are fighting and throwing hands.

The one on the roof in a rain/ice/snowstorm in high winds.

That's all I can think of at the moment and would prefer to forget.

Crawl spaces seem to be popular.

I had a no heat call on a gas fired furnace. Dirt crawl space about 40 inches high. Horizontal furnace of course. I'm working on it while the owner is near the entrance about 15 ft away. Its dark everywhere but where I am. I'm doing my thing, wondering why my old man couldn't be rich, when I hear a toilet flush from the living space above. The next thing I hear is spashing on the other side of the furnace. I wedge my head over the top of the furnace, shine my light, and see a cracked PVC waste line with a terrible attempt at repair. And lots of other cool stuff. I turned and shined my light at the owner and said "Are you f***ing kidding me?" There was no odor. I guess the dirt absorbed most of it, but I packed up and told him I'll be back when its fixed and de-grossed.

Definitely been some gross places and encountered some odd things, like that time I found a severed hand under a 60 year old VA hospital steam boiler that was either pinched off when setting the boiler or tossed in there by a funny employee on their way to the morgue down the hall (same job site, rode the elevator down to the basement AKA morgue with a guy we called Dr Kevorkian who was eager to show us the freshly amputated leg on his cart), but I worked in a R&D facility for a world renowned college about 6-7 years ago and although I was not working in this particular area, another worker brought me over to the area where they were working on an artificial human nervous system. There were cadaver parts, ranging from just a hand to a full corpse, on various tables doing various maneuvers. The one that still haunts me to this day is a pair of legs severed at the waist, with the toes on one foot twiddling around while the other leg was bending at the knee up and down while the foot remained flat on the table. I could deal with the hands and fingers since I have seen enough Addams Family in my day, but the vision of that leg kicking around without an upper body attached will be burned in my mind forever.

Your 3rd one reminds me of pulling cable in the trays in the unfinished ceiling of the gross anatomy labs. this is where med students dissect corpses to learn anatomy. It was about 50 years old and I was knocking probably 30 years of um…"dust" off of the trays.

Heh. The only job worse than the one I'm at today is the one I'm going to tomorrow. The one I was at yesterday wasn't too bad, though.