Old Triad Hot Water Baseboard Heat Chicagoland Area

corgi11

I have about 100 feet of old Triad baseboard ( 6 inch high fins about 1/8 in space between fins, steel covers with slots in the top front.) Water circulates through the bottom and top of all the baseboards all 1/2 inch parallel runs. Does anybody know rated output per ft in btu per different temperatures? House built 1954 , American Standard ArcoLiner Installed in 1953 converted to gas 1954 per original owner.

corgi11

Steamhead

Sure those fins are 6-inches high? How deep are they?

corgi11

corgi11

The fins are 1/2 inch deep and from the bottom of the 
bottom of the baseboard to where the slots start is six inches high. I can feel the bottom of the fins and see the top of fins through the slots in the baseboards..

Steamhead

Just 1/2" deep front-to-back? That's weird- none of my references have anything like that.

Regarding cleaning the fins- try setting your shop-vac to blow out rather than suck, then aim the air stream into the cover. If there's dust it should exit through the bottom.

corgi11

Sorry Steamhead they are about 1and 1/2 inches wide sorry for the mistype. They were almost exclusively in the Midwest I was told. Any help would be great and thanks again.

hot_rod

Piped with 1/2 or 3/4 tube? probably around 550 BTU/ ft.
At some point the tube size limits the output regardless of fin size. Flow rate also.

corgi11

Thank You. All 1/2 inch pipe. It seems with 6 inch tall fins and 1 and 1/2 inch wide fins 1/8 inch fin spacing and water flowing twice through the baseboard it might be more than that at the 205 limit on my boiler. Cases are made of steel. Water enters top of baseboard makes a u turn and comes back out of the bottom of the baseboard to the boiler.

Every thing seems bigger than the 1/2 inch slantline 15 half inch baseboard which has about the same rating you quoted.
Thanks for your answer.

hot_rod

Certainly the supply water changes output also. 205F is very hot!

Also know that BB in series, you take a temperature drop, so the last emitters have lower output.

Output is more accurate if you use AWT average water temperature instead of SWT supply water temperature.

corgi11

All rooms have. own supply and return runs. All rooms are parallel runs. I have no series runs.

Steamhead

@corgi11 , I looked this up in my "Hydronic Rating Handbook". The closest thing I can find has 5-1/4"x1-7/8" fins, two 1/2" tubes running thru them, 40 fins per foot and an inclined outlet. This has a rating of 780 BTU per foot with a cover 10-1/2" high and 905 with a 14-1/4" high cover. Since your fins are a bit bigger but the cover is not that high, I would think 780 BTU per foot is a reasonable number.

First thing I'd do is blast air downward thru the covers, as described earlier. See if you can get some dirt out of them. Dirty fins might explain the rather low ΔT.

mattmia2

I stopped reading the other thread after say 40 comments, but since this was a boiler just after circulators became a thing, are you sure the temp at the emitter is anywhere near the temp at the boiler or is it running almost as a gravity system? Will all the parallel runs, are you sure all the runs are getting enough flow to get near boiler temp even if some are? If it isn't balanced there is more than enough area in probably 1/4 to 1/2 of the piping to take all of the circulation from the boiler.

As far as the short cycling goes, perhaps your t-stat should have the CPH/anticipator set to a shorter cycle so it calls before the temp has dropped enough that it will hit high limit before the t-stat is satisfied.

corgi11

Thank you guys so much. My baseboard height is exactly 9 inches so I will go with the 780 BTU per ft. My boiler ibr net BTU is 73k and I have 100 ft.
I balanced out all my runs to 10 degrees delta t and same temps in each room 35 years ago.Honeywell anticipator set at 4cph.

mattmia2

Didn't you replace the boiler since you balanced it to the old boiler and circulator?

corgi11

Rebalanced 1st day I could since install this year when it was 40 degrees outside. Will definitely rebalance again when it gets much colder outside.

My neighbor just replaced his 70 year old boiler today same as mine 1gph oil converted to natural gas. Installer replaced his boiler with guess what a 140,000 input BTU Weil. His house is pretty much the size of mine. Now talk about oversizing. The installer told him the old one was140,000 input so they put in another one if the same size! 1gph=140,000 BTU. I asked if the installer ran a heat loss and my neighbor said he didn't need it The installer said replace same with same.