Old Home with Radiators and Hot Water Baseboards

ktuite1

Hello, I live in a 200 year old home and we recently changed out some the old hot water radiators to hot water basebords. We made this change just to give us more space in certain rooms. The system all works on one zone in a loop system (that's what the installer told me). The rooms that have the old radiators get VERY warm and comfortable and the rooms that have the new baseboards are FREEZING. The radiators are warm to the touch all day and the baseboards are cold to the touch after the initial pump of water goes through them. I don't know if I should call the heating guy to come back and fix the problem or if this is an expected change when you have a mix of radiators and baseboards. The furnace is a new high efficiency kind.

I am not experienced with heating systems at all -- so this is all out of my league. Any help you can give is greatly appreciated

Timco

3 letters

I have 3 letters for you...E D R. The bb heaters have far fewer square inches of heating surface, and do not have the mass of the radiators. copper fin baseboard never mixes with cast iron radiators, radiant 101 class period. The copper bb rooms will never keep up because the radiators satisfy and keep radiating, and the bb needs 180* water in them flowing to put out heat. For every minute they heat, the radiators put out maybe 10 times the amount of heat...or more. Very poor practice to mix copper baseboard with CI radiators. Shows a lack of understanding on the installer's part. Also, copper bb needs 180* water. If you have a outdoor reset system, it will lower the water temp likely too low to be effective in the bb. BB needs to be on its own zone in it's own areas, like a full basement on it's own pump.



Tim

CMadatMe

Sorry to Disagree With You Tim

Baseboard does not need 180 degree water consistently to heat a space. I agree that the rads and the board should each be on its own zone but the real question is. Did the installer do a heat loss and put in the correct amount of baseboard to overcome the heat loss for the rooms? Where is the t-stat? Is the room where the t-stat is installed have rads in it or the board? Is the board after the rads? Is this really a series loop system or a mono-flow system? May find that a simple fix maybe to add thermostatics and get this running on constant circulation but we need more information.

Timco

more specific

I agree that I should have been more specific and more detailed. The copper bb heaters only produce heat when there is water flowing, and depending on how much bb was used, it may need 180* water. Typically I find that the copper bb was never close to satisfying the load of the room where it was used (if they mixed CI rads & bb it is VERY likely the installer did not do a heat loss calc) and the best solution is to make 180* water to offer some better results for the lack of EDR. Agreed, if enough bb was used, it would not need 180* necessarily, but would need more flow than the CI rads will allow it to have anyway. I think the better solution would have been to use higher output bb or CIBB rather than start throwing in TRVs to make up for the lack of EDR on the bb...which still may not overcome the problem. A heatloss calc is step oine from here to determine how far behind the rooms with the bb really are now.



Tim

chuck172

baseboard and heat calc.

Playing around with Slantfin's hydronic explorer, its interesting how by adding fintube, you can real reduce the design temperature.

If you have the wall space, you can easily bring the temps down to 150' ish.

ktuite

Thank You

Thank you so much everyone -- this really helps us out a lot!! Hopefully with this new information we can get our home nice and warm.

-Kaitlyn