Retrofitting radiant into(onto) milking parlor floor and walls

Kevin Bouwman

I've been doing radiant infloor in new milking centers for over 10 years. My primary occupation is the installation and service of milk harvesting, storage, and cooling equipment. I sell desuperheaters as a component of the milk cooling equipment. I got started in radiant because my plumbing supplier convinced me that we could use the abundant hot water produced in the desuperheater to heat the milking barn if we did it with pex in the concrete. I did it and it worked great. That has been an extremely efficient system and it is still going strong. I've since done a dozen or so system with each one being a little more elaborate than the previous one. The unique application of a milking parlor took some experiance to get right. Some parlors are in use now 20 hours a day with cows entering and leaving the parlor constantly. This means that the infiltration loss is huge. I've learned that the only way to keep an often wet person comfortable in a milking parlor is to push the temps of all the surfaces surrounding him as high as those materials will permit. During milking I run 150 degree water into 5/8" loops, 9" to 12" OC with a max loop length of 250 feet. I also started doing the operator pit walls and put two tubes tight against the stainless steel curbing that forms the edge of the cow deck. This typically gives me a surface temp of 110 degrees F.

Enough background. I have a number of equipment customers with older facilities who know the owners of these new warm facilities and they are asking me if there is anyway we could retrofit this type of heat into their barns. Tearing out concrete is not practical or affordable. Usually we cannot milk the cows anywhere else. I could get a lot of profitable work if I could come up with a way to make the parlor pit floor and walls warm. For those of you who haven't seen a milking parlor, the environment is much like a car wash or a locker room shower that is in use many hours of the day. One idea I had was to use some kind of aluminum extrusion or custom bent stainless steel plate that would hold the tubing, pin an inch or two of foam to the existing wall, and become the new wall surface. Stapling small diameter tubing to the walls and then covering it with ceramic tile might work but it would be difficult to insulate properly and the types of tile and groute (epoxy) that are required in a milking parlor are not cheap. Any comments, ideas, or suggestions?

Dan Peel

This works

with far less BTU "carry out" in the wet environment. Enjoy....Dan

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hr

Would a radiant ceiling

retro fit work. generally you can run them hot. I have used aluminum transfer plates from Radiant Engineering, with copper tube snapped in. i mounted this right against the metel ceiling panels. 12" of blown in insulation above. a fairly easyretro fit without disturbing floors or wall mounted equipment.

hot rod

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Floyd_5

Alum. and copper....

Just wondering how they would get along...espec. in a damp environment.
How does the Copper and Alum. hold up for you...any problems???
I have a situation that I'd love to do that, but am afraid to mix the two....

hr

My install is

a pretty dry shop. Most baseboard is copper and aluminum, although they make rust resistor type now for moist locations.

hot rod

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Floyd_5

DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHH....

your right...didn't think of that!!
But, just thinking on the keyboard.....what about the different expansion rates???? Think that there would be any wear there??? Does 1/2 copper snap in the plates made for 1/2 pex???

So many toys... so little time!