He got the Pumping Away right,

Steve Minnich

dropped the ball on everything else though. I re-piped and re-used most everything there back in '06.

RobG

I trust that you are being sarcastic?

Paul48

The "plan" started with a bucket of fittings. We don't need no stinkin' manual !!!

JStar

I looked at that picture for one second, said NOPE, and quickly closed the image.

Steve Minnich

It gets worse. The wire management is just...

@RobG - No sarcasm. The first pump is "pumping away" from the point of no pressure change.

Steve Minnich

A clearer shot.

RobG

Stephen Minnich said:

I re-piped and re-used most everything there back in '06.

I was asking if you were the one that piped it. I should know better having seen your work. I think that you meant that is what it looked like before you re-piped it?

Steve Minnich

Yeah...that's why I said "He" in the original post. The very first boiler I piped with 2 months experience looked far better than this.

Steve Minnich

This is my re-pipe. not perfect but I had to stay close to the homeowner's budget.

RobG

It makes allot more sense now that you posted the "after" picture.

RobG

I have the impression that the pumping away was purely accidental.

Zman

You guys just don't understand what the original artist was trying to convey. I think the tree of life on the middle and it's fight to stay safe from dragon on the left and the serpents on the right is really beautiful. The copper branches are trying to protect the circulators from being replaced.
How could you destroy a fine work of art and replace it with something so, well, lineal?

Oh I'm sorry, I just re read the post and realized the customer wanted to heat a house. The "after" picture should do a much better job of that. Never mind.

RobG

Steve, Is the company who did this beautiful work still in business or was the installer the old "my brother in law is in construction"?

Steve Minnich

I think they went down not long after they piped this? It's rare I see one THIS bad. I see a lot where the piping is relatively clean and they kinda get the piping concepts but ultimately they miss.

You really have to be dedicated to do this thing we do. Far too many contractors now have the big corporate mindset of let's see how much we can do and how fast we can do it to generate as much cash as possible as fast as we possibly can and we'll deal with the fallout later.

Tom_133

Jstar said and did exactly what I did, so I second the "nope"!

RobG

This is why so many people switch to forced air. After all, even bad ductwork looks better than that crap. For the life of me, I have no idea what's going on in that maze of pipes. Did the system even work?

Steve Minnich

The fallout from not taking the time to do the job right the first time.
Systems that are designed and installed half-a$$ed for the sake of profit have consequences.
That fallout.
The goal is to design and install systems properly and be profitable.

RobG

The funny thing is that your clean install took less time and materials than the hacks half **** one.

Steve Minnich

I see it differently, literally. Some of the biggest, most successful HVAC companies in my area are doing hack work. They must be answering their phones because they've been around a long time. Not all, but some...too many in my opinion.

I worked for one of them in the mid 80's. We (servicemen/installers) would have weekly meetings with the bosses about the amount of parts we were or weren't selling on service calls or the fact that an installer went over the allotted time to install a piece of equipment and who was going to pay for that?

I bumped heads with them all the time. I wasn't going to sell a customer a contactor if the customer didn't need a contactor. I wasn't going to cut short the time it took to do the job right on an installation because the salesman who sold the job had never installed a boiler in his life. And when I was younger, I was as fast as anyone. Not so much anymore.

Not everyone took the stand I did so I was always going back to installs to clean up someone else's mess. Poor wire connections, refrigerant leaks, pumps flanges not tightened up, a T87F installed upside down (yes, you read that right), switches to brand new furnaces installed that day left in the off position, gas unions leaking, and on and on and on.

kcopp

curious.... did he modify the vent hood? It looks short... maybe its just me.

Steve Minnich

None taken. I just think we're on different sides of a semantics debate.

I see "fallout" as the aforementioned big guys sending guys back out until someone gets it right or the customer gets fed up and calls the next big guy out to take a stab at fixing it.

You see "fallout" as the big guy failing completely and going out of business.

BobC

I spent most of my life working in manufacturing, we built power supplies for everything from cable companies to the lunar lander. I started out in test and went into engineering and then management.

It was all custom work sometimes it was just a few sometimes it was a few hundred. One thing you learn very fast is how much it costs if something fails under warranty. A single return can wipe out the profit on dozens of shipped units, not to mention the customers faith in you. You do everything you can do to make sure things don't come back.

It's a delicate dance because you have to meet a price point but you can't afford to have it fail and come back. You had to use the most reliable parts you could afford and you had to watch out for pitfalls like tin plated contacts.

Bob

Canucker

Stephen Minnich said:

This is my re-pipe. not perfect but I had to stay close to the homeowner's budget.

This is much better. That first pic was making my head hurt. Badly.

qctechfred

That is one clean job !

I have a question, By the way the piping is made, example if the first 3 zones are heating, wouldn't the fourth one be considerably cooler than the first one? like if you lose 20 deg delta at each zone ?

Thanks and keep doing clean install like that !

Abracadabra

+1 for the duct tape.

Always use duct tape.

Steve Minnich

Thanks. The temperature of the water will decrease as it goes through the primary (boiler) loop, giving up btu/h to each secondary (system) loop, but not 20* per loop. Dan has a book on the subject called "Primary Secondary Pumping Made Easy!". In it, he explains in simple terms and math how the water temperature and GPM change as it goes through the primary loop.
What goes into a T, ....

SWEI

We use that to our advantage in multi-temp (source or load) systems.

qctechfred

Thanks for the explanation, but if it is use in multi-temp application, the temperature may change if not all the zone start at the same time?
Example if we want the 4th zone at 160 deg F and the boiler temp is at 180, if there is only the 4th zone heating It would be at 180 isn't it?

Thanks guys btw I love this site, I'm a young installer/technician and I'm still missing some education on hydronics heating

Steve Minnich

Lower SWT's can be achieved through 3 or 4 way mixing valves. Ideally, motorized valves that respond via feedback from sensors which monitor changing conditions. The 3 way mixing valves you see in the picture are not intuitive at all and cannot respond to changing conditions.
The specific scenario you describe of 180* boiler temp. and a single zone calling that needs 160* SWT is a bit unusual in my experience.
Radiant SWT should never be that high. In higher temperature applications, if a 160* SWT is needed it's typically the case across the board as dictated by an outdoor reset control or the fact that the amount of your EDR allows you to run at lower temps.

Gordy

Looks like a big vertical manifold

hot_rod

The main challenge with P/S piping is the always changing temperatures to the various secondaries cycling in and out.

Suppose you have six secondaries, run the numbers via the formula and all the connected loops get the temperature they require.

What if loops 1, 3 and 6 are running, the rest are off? Then those temperatures are changed from the design where all 6 run at the same time.

IF the goal is the have the exact temperature at every secondary, under any condition, you need an intelligent mixing device. A device that can monitor and respond to changing conditions.

Knowing that hydronics are fairly forgiving, I doubt many systems know or are bothered by temperatures less than designed for.

If you are counting on secondary 6, as an example to be 120F, iff all the others are off, good chance #6 gets much higher temperture.

Steve Minnich

Tell you what...if you can tell me your exact thoughts on a job 9 years ago, you're a better man than me. This was NINE years ago. You spent 3 days thinking about this? Not me. I've been working.

Steve Minnich

Not that it matters (to me, anyway) but I could show you plenty of cast iron boiler manufacturer's piping schematics utilizing P/S piping 9-10 years ago. This industry moves forward fast. The only mod con from back then that's still held in high esteem is Viessmann.
When Gil Carlson first came up with P/S piping, cast iron is pretty much all there was save for some steel boilers.

JStar

With P/S (even on a cast iron boiler), you are guaranteed to achieve the flow rates required in each branch.

JStar

Hatterasguy said:

JStar said:

With P/S (even on a cast iron boiler), you are guaranteed to achieve the flow rates required in each branch.

The individual circs on each circuit guarantee that (assuming the manifold is of sufficient size). P/S only guarantees the flow rate through the boiler.

That's mostly true. Yes, P/S guarantees flow through the boiler. But that also frees up the GPM requirements to be used in the branch circuits via individual circulators. With P/S, you can isolate each portion of the system and apply the appropraite circulator for its own needs.

JStar

We're saying the same thing. With one circulator for the entire system, you add the boiler restriction and branch circuit restrction together. With P/S, you only worry about them spearately. This allows us to install smaller circulators at lower energy consumptions.

And you get the benefit of thermal protection.

qctechfred

In my opinion, both ways to do it are good, direct-return and P/S.
I wasn't judging your job I was just informing myself on P/S piping details for future jobs. Sometimes internet change the comments tone.

Fred

Gordy

I remember when P/S was the holy grail around here before hydro seps. It insures Ci boilers against low return temps. Still not 100%, but better than direct return.

Even in high temp systems there is a chance a zone that has a deep set back could call at the height of a heat cycle, and dump cold return water to the hot boiler. If the boiler is a close match to the heat loss it can lead to boiler shock, and condensing.

Gordy

True that will work and is cheaper but output stops until boiler catches up.

JStar

And then as soon as the circulator starts again, all of that hot water leves the boiler and is replaced by cold water anyway. Seems wasteful.

Gordy

choo choo train chug chug woo woo