radiant controls, valves and recirc w/solar?

Michael

still want to run the piping while we poor the slab and be able to hook up the valves/controls later. Any recommendations on these? Simple controls in each zone. Best way to do the solar too? All on one water heater, or go with separate heat exchanger tank and boiler? I see the advantage of that setup but how expensive compared to a plain old all in one?
Mahalo
M.

Michael

radiant controls, valves, recirc w/solar?

Hi, looking for help planning a new residential radiant system, pretty basic for this group I think. Why, in Hawaii, would we want radiant heat you may wonder. Well, every now and then it rains for days on end and the temperature can plummet to the high 60s. Really tho, we want to lay a very basic 3 or 4 zone system into a concrete slab (2 or 3 zones) which will be the downstairs finish floor. We'd like to have separate thermostats (or just simple on-off switches) located in each zone which would I presume control valves off a manifold in the central utility room? We'd like to use pex-al-pex tubing in the slab and have it connected to the regular potable hot water system when on, and have the water heated with the normal residential hot water heater rather than a separate boiler. This is really only to warm the floors and the spaces above them a few degrees-- just to take the chill off on rainy days, since there are no snowy winters here. Can you advise the easiest/cheapest sound way to do this? Especially on the controllers and control valve arrangement?

Also, not to complexify the thread, but there will be a solar panel and we'd like to have one recirc pump that could handle the solar (timer), the radiant (when on) and to remote fixture manifolds (timer, or on demand button?) Recommendations? Is there a better way to do the solar and the tank hot water heater than to recirc all the potable water thru each?

Thanks a lot, and happy holidays.
Michael

Rick Kelly

Try this

Might be hard to find in Hawaii, but here we call them sweaters.