Can I put baseboard on Steam return line.

acl10

I was wondering can I put a few feet of baseboard in the basement in place of the one pipe steam return line. In other words the return water will flow thru the baseboard pipe back to the boiler and heat up the basement at the same time.

Snowmelt

yep if you google add a loop you will find a diagram on how to do it , the thing it doesn't tell you is how to do it electrically, you need a relay and a aqua-stat to shut the pump on when calling for heat and a aqua-stat to shut the boiler off when the temp goes above 180 degrees

STEVEusaPA

eh..........you might get some residual heat off of the pipes, but the flow is so slow it probably wont differ from just bare pipes. And you'll need some creative piping or split the return if the return piping is 1 1/2, 2", etc.

Ironman

Are we talking about a wet or dry return line? Either way, it's not gonna give up much heat.

Look in the Resorce section of this site for adding a hot water loop to a steam boiler.

mikeg2015

Condensate flow is very very low. I thought about this myself. But when you do the math you realize it's not a lot of water.

Consider a 300k BTU output boiler On a very cold day it might run 50% of the time. Do the math and you'll end up with 0.3GPM. So not bad. If you pull 60F out of it, you'll get 9000BTU's. Will need maybe 20' of fin tube baseboard (taking an estimate here) to accomplish that.


Off topic, but if you understand steam, then why a smaller AC unit dehmidifies better and saves enery even though it runs longer will make sense.

A good latent to sensible ratio if is 0.30 less with matched size coil. So to remove 1 gallon of condensate I need 8,051BTU's. So if I have a 3 Ton AC unit, and its sized typical and still only runs maybe 60% of the day, I can remove 19 gallons of water... I'll also remove 362,000BTU's of sensible heat.

If I downsize to 2.5 tons, it will run 77% of the time but will remove 21 gallons in the same conditions.

But in reality because the humidity is lower, you will keep it warmer, and with lower humidity the Sensible to latent ratio increases, or you run higher airflow so it's more efficient.

Next extreme, you go with a 2 ton system, it runs 90% of the time, might even fall behind be a few degrees late afternoon, but it still removes 19 gallons of humidity. But duct work size dropped dramatically from that 3 ton. Or on the same duct work, static pressure drops, air leaks drop, fan power drops.

Here's where it gets interesting. because the coil will only remove what drips off, in reality the 3 ton system only drains maybe 16 gallons because it turns on a off maybe 50 times a day and re-evaporates some. So that 2 tons system probably outperforms it and i can set it up to run at a higher airflow or a slightly oversized coil and get a 0.75 sensible to latent ratio, it runs less, longer run times, smaller duct work, probably 25-30% lower installed cost.

So why do we size too big? so we can use setbacks? Push the thermostat and have it cool down in 30 minutes?

Something to ponder.