SO, YOUR BUILDING YOUR DREAM HEATING SYSTEM

pipeking

 WHAT WOULD U USE, FOR YOUR HOME TO KEEP YOUR FAMILY COMFORTABLE?   RADIATORS, PANEL RADS, PANEL BASEBOARD, HI OUTPUT FIN/TUBE. OR RADIENT, FLOOR, WALLS, CEILING? OR HYDRO AIR, GEOTHERMAL, WHAT COMBOS? WHAT ABOUT THE ENGINE, CONVENTIONAL C.I., CONDENCING OIL FIRE, CONDENCING GAS, MOD/CON, OR HEAT PUMP? NAT. GAS, LP, LO SULFUR FOSSIL FUEL, OR NO SULFUR BIO DEISEL, SOLID FUEL WOOD/COAL, PROCESSED SOLIDS,WOOD, GRASS,CORN,ECT...

Boiler Talk

WHAT YOU LEFT OUT!

Steam heat.  Heating Oil #2.  By maintaining petroleum, you produce a better product.  Image what solar and Wind will be sommmmmmmmmmmme day!   Right now we taxpayers are paying for make believe benefits.   Wind kills millions of birds a year and these criminals are given a waiver.  OK.  Natural Gas is a good choice too, but you might find a monopoly because there are fewer suppliers in your neighborhood.  Please advise. 

Jamie Hall

If I were building a new home?

Solar.  With the correct storage and fans to keep things nice and cozy.  Can it be done here in New England?  No problem at all.  I can name a dozen houses which do it.



If I were to do a dream heating system for the building I superintend?  Spruce up what's there some.  No changes.



I can't generate much enthusiasm for wind -- it's noisy, it's a blight on the landscape, it kills birds.  Nor solar electric.  And both suffer from big-time storage problems.



Natural gas is nifty -- if you can get it.  The odds of it getting to where I am are somewhere between slim and none.



Biodiesel?  I'd rather eat the food than burn it, thank you very much.



Wood is fine for the pioneers -- but it's a very limited resource.  Coal is difficult to manage for a small installation, and the mining for it isn't all that clean.



So -- I'll stick with my faithful Carlin, and #2 fuel oil, and I my lovely lovely vapour steam!

heatpro02920

dream dream, anything but steam...

I had steam in my first house, I am just not a steam guy, I bought that house when I was about 20 years old {still own it, rental property} and I couldn't wait to rip them radiators out and install sheet metal.... My service manager LOVES steam, he has Burnham triple pass steam boiler with a Carlin gas burner in it, and swears buy it, I am envious because he has his dream system. He refurbishes steam radiators as a hobby, he actually paid more than a decent boiler costs for some very odd {I never seen} radiators for his addition {vert tube rads with like 60 tubes, really nice looking}, he has a paint booth at his house for coating them.... Hes always trying new insulations, he kind of invented his own, using reflective wrap....



But for me, when I built my house {2009}, I said I was going to do my dream system, but we started at 2200 sq feet and a $252,000 budget then $500,000 and 4000sq ft later I ended up with a Rinnai tankless {80&er} and a Buderus GB160, running 3 hydro airs...



I just picked up a TT solo to replace the GB160 {which has made me happy and I may have a tear in my eye when I pull her down} but Customers are asking about SS more and more {you know them customers that do research on the web and read about aluminum HE's}, and I like to try what I sell.... So if we are going to make the switch from Bud to TT, It will be in my house first {well second since I installed a 110lp today t a customers house}... So now I will have 2- 9.8gpm 95% rinnia units {we have 5 full bathrooms and you can run the shower in all five while filling the jet tub and not run them down, but if you open both jet tubs and the body spray shower it wont spray, them spray nozzles use like 4 gpm each}



But that still in not my dream system, my dream system would be...



Geothermal -a dozen wells, lol , running 3- Water Furnace Series 7's and a 2- 5 series water/water units.... And I would have radiant everywhere, towel warmers, counter tops, driveway, stairs, porches, stair railings, everywhere would have tubing in it lol... Then I would have the field next to my yard cleared and I would install as many solar panels as I need to run my house {I don't do that part so have to sub it out}.....



That would be my dream system, I priced the materials and drilling when I was building and it was high, now with the new 41 eer series 7s and the fact it would be a retro on the radiant, I would imagine It would be around $125K if I did all the PF work my self, then the Solar field would probably be another $150K...... So considering that is over twice what I owe on my mortgage I wont be doing it anytime soon....

pipeking

SYSTEMS LIKE THAT

are so hard to get the return in a life time. but i do beleive that systems like that should exsist. if your property has been in the family(for generation) and is always going to be in the family (for generations) then of corse it is a family investment, and worth it. another would be a sustainable company property, where the investment can be used to it's full potential. i applaude anyone who tackles such a project!

pipeking

and STEAM, AND #2OIL.....

and everything else in between! as for wind, i only know of it prducing electricity, which can heat a building, BUT....

pipeking

and STEAM, AND #2OIL.....

and everything else in between! as for wind, i only know of it prducing electricity, which can heat a building, BUT....

pipeking

WHY DON'T

 u like biodeisel? and please don't say for it's lack of lubircation!

Tom_133

Hmm

I haven't really done much thinking about a dream system, but I asked an older plumber 10 years ago and he said it would be a condensing boiler, Natural gas with 5 - 120 gallon buffer tanks. Radiant everything and an outdoor wood boiler piped into the loop to allow him to fire it up and cook those tanks once a day.

I asked him why not one big buffer he said if it fails then his system fails, but if one tank fails he could isolate and swap no sweat.



Not a bad system for 10 years ago

pipeking

I LOVE

 the idea of renewable energy, e.g. wood.  U KNOW that sounds like a good idea, by maximizing the wood boilers limited down firing, and sustaining it's effiecientcy by burning hot for the period of time to reserve enough energy for the day. i sure would love to do the math to see how long 600gal./ 200*f  would sustain an average house.

SWEI

radiant

over the largest surface area possible.  Floors, walls, ceilings, whatever it takes.  Proper passive solar design works magic here.  Solar thermal collectors, large buffer tank, and a wood gasifier for backup.

pipeking

whoa

 so u think the solor would be able to handle it. i love wood boilers, but they do have work involved. but solor and wood only might have some downfalls, i would think u would have to always have the boiler stoked, so if the solor can't keep up then u have heat right away. now that kind of defeats the it as a back up. what do u think?

pipeking

whoa

 so u think the solor would be able to handle it. i love wood boilers, but they do have work involved. but solor and wood only might have some downfalls, i would think u would have to always have the boiler stoked, so if the solor can't keep up then u have heat right away. now that kind of defeats the it as a back up. what do u think?

SWEI

active solar

is not even necessary in our climate with proper design.  350 days of sunshine and mild summer temps...

Jamie Hall

What might be called

semi-active solar can handle the design space heating loads of a residence in New England; that is to say, properly designed it will manage a -10 F design temperature, and be able to hold that for a week of clouds and recover in two days of sun.  We have lousy weather around here, but it doesn't get much worse than that.



The keys to it are adequate and properly designed solar collectors, adequate and properly designed storage, and an air circulation system which can effectively move the heat to and from the storage and which, not incidentally, can exchange the air in the house (for air quality reasons) without losing much of the sensible (in the engineering sense of the word) BTUs.



A full passive design -- no air circulation -- is handicapped in terms of storage, but will happily run without backup in this climate on any day with two or more hours of sun.  Beyond that and it does need backup heat --which can be provided quite nicely for a 1500 sq.ft. house by a nice big wood stove.



How do I know?  Built a couple of the 100% semi-active houses a couple of decades ago, and the owners are ecstatic.  And lived in a full passive design until I took over this ark...

jumper

doesn't matter

Modern houses are so tight that any itsy bitsy heating will do. Integrate with the ERV.

The most comfortable old house I knew had ceiling radiant. Built in the early fifties when they still fully plastered ceilings, there was plenty of mass to keep things even. Only complaint was that some ladies said their feet were cold during long dinners. On the other hand similar homes never stayed balanced. When weather or wind changed there was a call to screw around at the manifold. If I was absolutely certain house won't shift, my fantasy would be steam radiant ceilings. Cozy bathrooms and shower stalls.

pipeking

SO JAMIE

 u would like an air handler w/heat exchanger, instead of radiant tubing, or other aqua convectors?

pipeking

jumper

 this house from the 50's, was the radaint installed in the 50's also? steam radiant,huh,sounds good; but radaint ussually is lo temp, how would you control hot spots, and have even heat?

heatpro02920

PipeKing

Yah, a $300K heating system {although it would supply electricity too...} is excessive, My house was only $500K total lol.... But it could pay for itself faster than you think...

I have a customer {lives rite down the road} who has a house larger than mine, he had 3 Oil fired Burnhams {3 sections} and baseboard heat throughout the entire house {all the outside walls}, then he had 4 10 seer ac units for cooling.. I met him when he stopped over to say hello and introduce himself when we were building, and took my card....



he calls me about 3 weeks later to check out his system.... I went over and looked over everything, it is what it is, all working how it was designed and doing what its supposed to...



Heres the problem, he was spending $12K in oil per year and $4K in summer electricity.. But this is a BIG OLD house... {new windows, doors, and updated insulation though not drafty by any means, very well kept house}....



So he asks the question "what can you do", I said give me a couple days Ill work up a proposal... I just pulled it up on my laptop to remind myself of everything...



I proposed 4 Geothermal Heat pumps hooked into his AC duct work {I had to change it a little but it was done well when they did the retro}.... Cost was $76,900!!! By far the most expensive Residential Job I ever wrote a proposal for!!!!



I mailed it, lol and put a note to call me with a smiley face, he calls me, and I said {you werent standing up when you read that were you??? Im not thinking he is even going to be interested, but he really wants to talk about it!!! I meet with him and get some numbers together, he wants to know the electricity usage because his son in law installs solar panels!! So I get him the data.... About 3 days later I get the signed proposal back in the mail!!!!



I had the wells done and installed the geothermal units and desuperheater for DHW, it works beautiful, about 3 months later he has a bunch of solar panels installed, I speak with him all of the time and he heats and cools his house for around $600 per year!!! So from $16000 to $600 is a savings of over $15K per year, I have no idea what the solar cost him, but my end was just over $80K all done, but even if the solar cost him $80K he will get it back in 10 years!!!



I remember thinking this guy is crazy he is never going to see a return, only to learn a lesson about people with a lot of money , sometimes there is a reason they have that money, and its most likely not because they are not intelligent... Them geothermal units 5 all together {4 air and 1 water} do his entire property, driveways walkways, pool house, pool heater, hot water, and cooling, and all they use is electric , which he is getting from the solar system....



Plus I would imagine he got a ton of rebates and gets paid back for the poer he puts back in the grid....

SWEI

augmented passive solar

is how I'd describe what works here.  Passive solar can deal with over 90% of the season here and it's hard to get any kind of ROI for that final fraction.  Most use direct-vent gas, wood or pellet stoves for this.  The well-heeled often prefer radiant which leads strangely enough to a resistance electric boiler in many cases.

Gordy

Mine

Another 50's ceiling radiant, and floors.



Like jumper most comfy ever. I have RFH in the basement. Radiant ceilings through out on main floor. I installed RFH in kitchen, bathroom, and dining room when I tiled it them. Did sandwich sleeper with 3/8 copper . So those rooms have ceiling, and floors



As far as doing solar I could if I wanted to with this system.



Not to big on the solar pv panels yet. Their efficiency needs to come way up in my opinion. 18-20% efficiency just does not cut it. Need a whole lot of panels to do some reasonable work.



Hot water solar is the way to go.

Jamie Hall

Exactly

One of the real problems with superinsulated houses -- we saw it in another thread just recently -- is that unless you bring in outside air, the air quality inside really suffers.  I like to see 4 to 6 air changes per hour.  But... if you do that without a heat exchanger, you're losing a lot of BTUs, which you don't want to do either!



We (my father in law and I) experimented with heat exchangers handling both latent and sensible heat, but they presented some air quality problems of their own -- not to mention being costly.  So a fairly simple sensible heat heat exchanger works well enough.



We did use water as the primary heat storage medium.  It's convenient and cheap!  It also has very high heat capacity, which is what you are looking for.  However, since we were already dealing with a fan and some ducting for the heat exchanger, we elected to move air in the houses, rather than moving the water.  There is no particular reason why one couldn't move the water as well, the only real problem being that one doesn't want the water temperature too high (your storage losses increase rapidly with increasing temperature) and "too high" in most cases translates to "too low" for most hydronic or radiant applications.  For all that, though, the way the storage is arranged in these houses results in the upper floor ceiling being nice and warm, with a substantial radiant effect from the storage anyway.



The biggest single problem we ran into was dumping excess heat; if the collectors are adequate for covering the worst winter conditions, they will overheat during the shoulder seasons (spring and fall) unless provision is made for controlling that.

pipeking

SO FAR WE HAVE....

1)OIL,TRIPLEPASS C.I.,STEAM

2)GEO/HEATPUMPS W/RADIANT&PANALRADS,HX IN AIR HANDLER

3)WOOD GASIFIER HEATING 600GAL.STORAGE ONCE ADAY,RADIANT EVERYTHING,NG.MOD/CON BACKUP

4)SOLAR,RADIANT EVERYTHING,WOOD GASIFIER BACKUP

5)SOLAR,FORCED HOT AIR

pipeking

SO YOUR SAYING?

solar yea or nea? u say solar is not efficient enough for heating, but then say would use it for hot water. so what would your dream system be, with todays tech?

Littlelandlord

Steam

Properly sized in a new home with plenty of insulation. Must have standing pilot, gas fired, and operate without electricity. Then I won't have a nervous breakdown every time LIPA does.

Gordy

Solar

My opinion is yay for solar hot water heating for domestic, and radiant, and nay on solar PV as of to date. Yay for GSHP so long as the design will allow for low temps on the emitters.



Radiant lends itself well to solar, and GSHP do to low supply temps 115 with 105 average throw a mod con in the mix, and your percolating condensate.



As far as wood, or pellet boilers. If you got the wood for free, and like the work so be it. Pellets not impressed corn or what ever they got everyone, and bumped the fuel price up.





Not saying steam, or others are not comfy just like my radiant.

Jamie Hall

Quite agree with Gordy

Solar photovoltaic is not ready for the big time yet.  Not even sure about the little time.  It is, however, good for domestic hot water.  It is wonderful for space heating -- provided, and this is an important point, that the building is designed for it in the first place.  It is quite possible to add effective domestic hot water to an existing structure.  It is almost impossible to retrofit space heating.  But designed from scratch?  Depends a bit on how fanatical you are, but it is trivial to get 75% of your heat that way, and it can -- as I mentioned above -- get to 100% in New England with some thought and care.  So it is plenty efficient for space heating!

CMadatMe

I'd Do This

http://www.viessmann.com/com/content/dam/internet-global/pdf_documents/com/brochures_englisch/ppr-micro_chp_boiler.pdf



With domestic solar hot water, radiant and panel rads..Would turn that 1st floor radiant into my cooling too..

CMadatMe

I'd Do This

http://www.viessmann.com/com/content/dam/internet-global/pdf_documents/com/brochures_englisch/ppr-micro_chp_boiler.pdf



With domestic solar hot water, radiant and panel rads..Would turn that 1st floor radiant into my cooling too..

pipeking

CHRIS

  do u know how this cool machine works. i have 3 geusses, internal combustion (which i think would be very noisy0., or a homopolar motor a type of electromagnetic propulsion, but that uses a lot of electricity, and steam pressure.wrong,wrong,and.....wrong.  i red the whole pdf. file but i can only guess from the pic, cuz there is no definative discription.

CMadatMe

I'll Let Ya Know

When I get back from Viessmann Germany next month. There is also a boiler

Under development with a built in heat pump for ground source geo.

Gordy

Sterling engine

Operates by temperature differences. Combustion is involved but to the tune of a burner.



V is quality. Don't believe they would introduce a product that was not engineered for efficiency, longevity, and silence. That's just the way it is across the pond. The boiler is in the kitchen, bedroom etc.



I would say it looks like a free piston design which has all most no friction.

What do you think Chris.

Gordy

Wow

NG would have to get to 3.50 a therm before it would be a wash with present electric rates of .12 a KW.



Question is ROI.

pipeking

gordy

don't mean to get off topic but i'm at .089$kwh, a little less then u so it would need to be worth it. but i've worked on some huge generators that r coled by heating the buiding it serves; i forget the name (brain fart) but it will come to me. but they r huge v10 engines runing a generator and they extract the heat from everything,the engine,power head,exhaust. i had helped out a buddy of mine on a couple jobs, the company he worked for did them (small company,paid me cash,....dam i wish i could remember the name. but i always thought, i've done work on some industrial steam systems, and they got to make steam all day for prosessing, and woundered y they didn't put in a steam turbine w/power head to make electricity

Jean-David Beyer

My latest electricity bill in Monmouth County NJ

The price for electricity here, all costs (generation, delivery, customer charge, and so on) comes to $0.1515/KWH. Electricity runs the stuff around the house, including the circulators and blower in my boiler, but not hot water. It does run a kitchen stove and an electric clothes drier. No teenagers or wives in the house, though.



Natural gas, that does fire my boiler and heats the house and the hot water, is $1.2162/THERM, including price for the gas itself, delivery, and customer charge.