slant fin question from novice

johnri

For a new house I'm building I'm using hot water baseboard heat. Is it typical for baseboard to run on every outside wall? Also is it typical to run the total perimeter of a room... from wall to wall and around corners? I'm trying to figure how much baseboard would be required. This room has a peaked ceiling (triangle shaped) with a high point of 9 feet. The room is 14 x 17' . Thank you for your help.

Jean-David Beyer

Not usual.

It is not usual to run Slant/Fin all around a room, but you just might wish to do it. Kind of expensive, though.



Normally, people seem to run 180F water through those things, and you use enough to deliver the required BTU/hr into the room. To determine the required heat flow, you have to calculate the heat loss, and then look up the heat you get per foot on the table for the kind of baseboard you are using; in your case, at the Slant/Fin web site.



By those calculations, I have a lot more baseboard than required for two rooms of my house. I did that on purpose because I have a mod|con boiler and I wanted to run at as low a temperature as I could to get maximum condensing without being ridiculous. So I ran the baseboard the entire width of each room. I could have done two more walls in each room, but that would have been ridiculous and actually quite difficult due to the obstructions. I estimate I could get away with 130F water on the design day, but the modulating feature I set to go up to 140F just in case.