Balancing older apartment building heating

jeff_51

just wait for the TRV's next year

John_54

balancing hot water heat

I own a 50 year old apartment building. 24 units 4 floors. The heating works pretty good but is short of controls. The ground floor is hot and the 4th floor isn't. There is often about 6 degrees celcius difference in room temperature. It is a 2 pipe system and there are 2 zones with separate pumps, one does one side of the building and the other does the other side They have gate valves but thats it. Each convector has a quarter turn valve on one pipe. These are all fully open. The system runs at 35 PSI. I would like to put thermastatic valves on the convectors on the bottom 2 floors but not this year. My question is is it a good idea to throttle back the heat in the lower floors using the quarter turn valves and will there be enough control with such a small amount of movement from open to shut? Thanks for your help.

jeff_51

if they are butterfly valves then you certainly can

even if ball valves you can for the short term untill you do the trv's. So I guess the answer would be yes. May not be ideal. Try continous circulation with an outside controller. Not that expensive and you may want to do that with trv's anyway. You could also do continous circ without the outside controller. Where is the stat located?

John_54

Thanks for the advice Jeff, I'm already using continuous circulation. I have an aquastat in the furnace room on the supply. It is set at 140 at the moment. And another aquastat which will bring on the other furnace when the outside temp goes below 20. Not very fancy but reliable. I had a bad experience with a more complicated controller that failed a few years ago. The building is out of town so I didn't know there was a problem until I got the gas bill.