Best Of

Thank you all for the gracious compliments.

Leon

I hope Santa brought @leonz a nice bag of coal. 😀

Jeff,

It's a Fantom, made by American Standard. Designed to be either partly recessed in or hung on a wall or exposed… like a Sun-rad.

Check out Page 22 of this 1937 catalogue: (description and styles pp. 19 - 27)

https://www.heatinghelp.com/assets/documents/American-Radiators.pdf

Natural gas? Gas pressure drops at night in your area maybe?

For equipment like boilers, furnaces. Being made in America seems to make little difference in my experience. The assembly of the unit is only a small piece of that puzzle. I have seen plenty of those units assembled in the US that have used lower quality components (no matter those components country of origin) and have been poorly assembled. I have also seen the opposite side of this, where a US made piece of equipment sourced higher quality components and assembled the equipment very well. If a company decides to assemble here just for the "made in the USA" label, but sources cheaper components to offset the cost of US assembly, there may not be any benefit in overall quality (not factoring in any geopolitical concerns on this)

Individual components that are US made (pipe, fittings, small electronics etc) there seems to be an overall quality improvement over certain country of origin, specifically any country with cheap labor. Cheaper labor+lower tolerances = less expensive product that can be sold at a higher margin. If you look at European manufacturing, more or less I haven't noticed a huge quality difference between the US equivalent, but we don't really get to test all of these out as some European made products wouldn't make as much sense to import due to differing size standards. There is also the same incentive in Europe to turn profit as we have here, I imagine the quality spectrum is quite similar.

In general it seems to me that if you are manufacturing pretty much anything where the labor is relatively expensive, it starts to make less sense to source inferior materials or components (no matter where those may come from), but it most definitely still happens. You are already not going to be in the cheapest price range and might as well go for the higher quality market. As with all business there is incentive to cheap out somewhere to turn more profit, and I'm afraid that is a human nature issue rather than a country of origin issue.

Agreed. He graciously walked me through the tank replacement for my neighbor's Parlor boiler.

One of my clients up in the Leatherstocking Region of Upstate NY had a friend with furnace problem. I few quick emails and he hooked them up. Heatinghelp.com...what a great resource....Mad Dog

The only part that is radiant is the kitchen addition and that now has a mixing valve. The rest of the house is cast iron radiators. As long as the supply water temp is at or above the setting on the mixing valve, changing the supply temp shouldn't impact the water temp in the radiant floor portion of our heating system

With our previous boiler, there was no mixing valve so the supply water temp was kept lower (around 150 max).

I think our system will be fine with the lower supply water temps so I'm giving that a try and seeing how low to go. I will then will then work on adjusting a custom outdoor reset.

Ok so changing the Heating Cycle Rate on the the T-Stats made minimal difference in overshoot. I have been emailing my installer and he suggested turning off the outdoor reset and setting the supply water temp somewhere between 140-150F and see how it goes. I just set it for 150f which is 20 degrees cooler than the 170F that it was calling for with outdoor reset on (set to radiator curve, outside 25F). If that improves the overshoot and the heat is still keeping up well then I can come up with a custom outdoor reset. I don't see any way listed in the manual to adjust the shape of the curve, just the high and low supply water temps and max and min outdoor temps. I will attach screen shots of the relevant pages in the manual. Thanks again.