Excited about Boiler Design
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closed the door to the den and the temp went right back up to 67 F (set at 70). Clearly air infiltration (and chimney effect of rest of the house) is hurting my ability to heat that room. IR gun is next up to try and find more sources of air leaks.
Maybe I will look into renting equipment to DIY insulation. And “great stuff to the rescue where I find air infiltration.
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now temps are up to 49 F and I found the house a little warm. So I reduced most of the schedule temperatures and will let the system run on auto-pilot a few days until we have our next cold spell.
I can hope that the mortar that I added to the big cracks on the outside of the cinder block wall stopped some killer drafts, along with my spray foam into the outlets and all other big cracks.
My daughter picked up 16 cans of great stuff last night. So I will be continuing to seek drafts to stop with foam and caulk.The dirt crawl space is an area I’ve yet to crawl into, but tarps for the ground are likely my next step to be able to crawl into there without getting filthy. Tar paper might be the free solution though.
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Poly tarps are an inexpensive option for crawls. Insulate the walls of the crawl space. Tar paper is messy to kneel on and rips easily.
Air leaks where the plate and rim joist wood framing touches the foundation is "low hanging fruit" for those spray foam cans. Rigid foam board for the rim and joist bay ends, adhered in place with spray foam
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream
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thank you @hot_rod !!
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I am assuming the poly tarps are just like regular tarps with the grommets at the corners. Yes, I should buy those. I wonder if I can get one large enough to not only cover the whole dirt floor, but also go up the brick foundation, with a nice fold in the corner. That could be awesome. 12x18 is the dirt areas. I might only need to add about 2 feet to each dimension to be able to go up the wall. So 14x20 is probably all I need, but maybe it would also be smart to be able to have it divide the concrete area too. So maybe another 2+ feet in length. So I will look for at least 14x22.
It’s surely worth ponying up for the heavy duty version that has a silver side that will help with lighting:Getting OT for boiler design. But I guess this is about reducing drafts, helping assure lower modcon temps will work to heat the house.
I should be at my desk in the basement tomorrow and can keep track of what’s going on with the zones.
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InsulTarp foam blankets are great for this, white side up helps in dark crawl spaces and they insulate the walls nicely
Fairly $$. They are basically concrete blankets.
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
a friend of mine has a bunch of tan very thick material that would be ideal, but we both agree that it would probably be too thick and heavy to get in, but it also is cut into widths that are probably less than 10 feet each.
While I want to do this right, it seems like something I could really end up overthinking. So maybe I should just buy a friggin tarp and get into that space and insulating. This one here is 20 ml instead of the 12 ml of the harbor freight and can be had in white too. Returnable and only an additional ~$33 over the harbor freight shipped. .
Back on the zones/ temps. The Den addition zone seems to be doing fine, but when I went around at 8:15 after the morning warm period with the heating schedule was over, the upstairs radiators were cool, the downstairs were still a little warm, but the den radiators were downright toasty, signaling that even these ~40 F temps and a more constant heating rate will require higher radiator temps in the den if I don’t get it better insulated or add additional radiators.
I bet the can lights in the attic are a major source of cold air infiltration still. Maybe I should get a tarp or sheets of some type of plastic to put up there too.
Edit: oh boy. I just got on a ladder to feel. Those can lights sure are letting the cold in. That’s going to be a big one.
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There is a specific way to insulate around can lights that have incandescent bulbs so they don’t get too hot
As for the crawl, insulate the walls, just the tarp for a vapor barrier or to make it cleaner to work down there
Might get a radon test kit down there also. Get them online or at the box stores
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
yes, we run LED bulbs, but you never know if someone will put an incandescent in there. I do plan on making sure it’s fire safe. I need to research that at bit.
Since I setup a basement desk and plan to finish the space, I got an Airthings wave sensor and have been tracking the radon levels. $109 seems well worth it.
We just went above the 1.3 average for the first time over the weekend. We were out at an event and the basement was probably closed off. Interesting.
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on my insulation project I got a new toy this week. I found some new outdoor air blowing right into the bathroom where the floor was done poorly around the radiator. Great stuff to the rescue.
Tarp arrived for crawlspace, nd the second insulation guy showed up, but wasn’t the shape of guy that would have had an easy time getting into the crawl space or attic. I gave him my videos and he said he’d come back with the installation manager. He also said you can’t just blow insulation on top of concrete, but need to install supports under the joists to support insulation. I’m not sure how that’s going to work for the back half of the addition.
I had planned on opening the attic and putting buckets over the can lights, but I found that I had a bunch of LED can light bezels that I installed instead for now. I know they don’t make a seal, but they did really slow down the airflow from the attic a lot. Before there was a cold circle where the light was. Now you c. See whether there’s no insulation around the can light(s).
At this point, I bet it will be after the holidays before I do more insulation work or touch the boiler install stuff. The boiler still doesn’t have a delivery appointment.
The light switch in my stove range broke, and I had to resolver the rheostat wire. I degreased the heck out of it and also worked on the drafts. Great stuff to the rescue there too. I sealed behind all the cabinets near the vent, and I think I’ve stopped all those drafts. We are making lots of progress stopping the drafts. I figured this out, but I posted a video anyway.
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As I was working on painting and hanging 105 year old shutters, restoring 105 year old dried out window sills, and restoring a 105 year old arched wood window, the Combi boilers for the garage and house projects both arrived Thursday. I’ve now got projects lined up for eternity.
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Back of napkin math, in another later post you corrected the length to 20’ of cast iron baseboard. Looking at the Baseray chart from Burnham it looks like with your average water temperature (140-170) you’re getting about 350 btus per foot. So 7000 btus into the space for heat. Rough math you need around 16,000 btus to heat it, currently A deficit of 9000 btus. Now if we look at (130*~140*) water from the new modcon, your looking at about 245btus per linear foot of output. 4,900 btus to heat the space, an 11,000 btu shortage. Could you install (2) Beacon-Morris K120 kick space heaters cut into the floor so it just looks like a register in the floor?
Change the room thermostat to a two stage tstat. Let the first stage control the baseboard heat then let the second stage cycle the kick space heaters on and off to make up the difference? Each kickspace heaters is good for 8875 btus at 120* entering water temperature with the fan on high. That should leave you plenty of head room to just run them on low so they are quiet. Just thinking this might be a fairly simple, relatively inexpensive option to quickly get more heat into the space without taking up a lot of real estate in the room.
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thank you @Mosherd1 ! Yes, I do think it’s going to be interesting to see how it all works out with the modcon. Keeping the door open to that room also helps keep it warmer with just air circulation to the rooms around.
I would love to see how the 3 zones and all rooms perform as a single zone after getting the modcon installed and measure how well each room heats. Ideally, the circulators will run nearly 24/7 on the modcon. So I think when setting the curve, there will be lots of trial and error.
looking at the design of the inside of the combi boiler, it seems the DHW is like a little transmission or oil cooler for a car, and it will surely divert the boiler heating water to the DHW heat exchanger when calling for DHW. So long showers could result in some loss of heating power during those times, maybe the target temp not being met for CH. That is going to be interesting to see how much that effects things.
Totally off topic… I was at my boss’s house where we work in his basement. He keeps the upstairs about 60 F and the cold air blowing out of the air vents was terrible. He has a sofa right under one of them. I don’t know how cold he keeps the basement, but his rack of servers generates some nice heat and helps keep the place warm. I am just so glad to have radiant heat as opposed to forced air. And my neighbors have a terribly noisey heat pump right next to their natural gas generator that runs in maintenance mode for no apparent reason so often. It’s nice to know that my systems aren’t a nuisance to my neighbors. I do understand the value of the heat pump technology and do plan to use some of it in the future.Speaking of heat pump and auxiliary heat, perhaps when I re-duct the first floor AC, I could add some heat-pump heat to the first floor.
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