residential retrofit recommendations

John Livingston

My original Arco Petro boiler is 70 years old. Because there are few folks around here who are willing to work on it, we are tied to a rather pricey oil supplier who also provides a service contract. We're about to refinance and I'm trying to talk my wife into getting enough cash out to replace the boiler. I need your help in finding a good unit and in convince her of the value in the switch. Our house is a poorly-insulated clapboard structure of about 2800 SF. We typically use about 1000 gallons of oil a year. The unit provides hot water heat to in-wall heat exhangers, as well as domestic hot water with an in-tank coil year-round. We have fairly hard water here and had the coil acid-flushed about ten years ago., and it's done a reasonable job of keeping us in hot water since. I'm tempted to oversize the new unit a bit as I'm thinking about running a line out to our free-standing, 400 SF garage. I occasionally have car projects during the winter and am tired of the kerosene and propane heat arrangments I've tried thus far.

I looked at the Munchkin unit, but the stainless boiler job is only available for gas. The Burnham Opus looks nice, but sure is heavy. The System 2000 is also interesting, but I don't know if anyone in this area is experienced with them.

The unit is in our half-basement, which is also used as our computer room (!) as well as laundry. I guess anything will be more compact than what we currently have.

Something that I might be able to keep clean myself would be a plus.

Thanks!

John Livingston
Newport News, VA

Ken_8

I suggest

the Monitor HFX.

Highest efficiency oil boiler in the 'hood.

Hook that bad boy up to a non-coil type indirect water heater (Weil McLain Plus) and you are in business!

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S Ebels

My Humble Opinion

Assuming the following:

A. Your chimney is servicable or can be relined with a stainless flue liner.

B. You are using oil as your heat source yet.

C. You are willing to look at equipment that has a little higher up front cost.

D. We are staying with non-condensing equipment. (personaly, I feel that the 5 percent additional efficiency you might get with condensing equipment is not enough to offset by the length of life and reliability of "standard" equipment.)

Here's what I'd do and look at if it were mine.

I would first and foremost get enough money to bring the building envelope up to snuff if at all possible. Windows, insulation and doors. That type of investment will pay big dividends regardless of the efficiency of your heating system.

As for equipment selection, you would start out with a heatloss calculation to determine the btu output required from your new boiler. If someone comes in and gives you a quote without doing this, disregard it or at least put it on the bottom of the pile. While doing this, make allowances for future expansion if you desire.

Once your heating load is pinned down you can make an intelligent choice as to what size boiler you need.

My choices would be, in order of ascending price not preference:

Buderus' G115/215 series with the 2107 boiler control and an indirect fired water heater.

Viessmann Vitorond series with their KW10 control to manage the boiler temp and the indirect.

Viessmann Vitola 200 series with the same control or the Vitotronic 200 control if you want to manage two different water temps. This would be in the event that you do some lower temp stuff like radiant floor or walls in the future.

All of these will:

Give very long service life.

Run in the high 80% range for effiency.

Are so easily cleaned that it's actually fun to do.

Built and designed with service in mind because in Europe if you don't service your boiler, they take it away from you.

Come with state of the art burners which are also easy to service.

Have controls that are designed by the manufacturer to work with that particular boiler. These controls are very reliable from my experience. All of them will change your system water temp based on the outside air temp. This makes for a very comfortable home with the minimum amount of fuel used. The heat is "on" 24/7 but it varies how much the system is actually putting out. Like the cruise control on your car, which applies more fuel to a higher load, the heating system will apply higher water temp during colder weather.

All of these boilers are designed to handle these lower water temps directly, without any mixing device or bypass loop. The Buderus and the Vitorond will go down to 110* or so and the Vitola will take any water temp that is thrown at it.

Here's the web sites for both, check 'em out and enjoy.

www.buderus.net

www.viessmann-us.com

Paul Mitchell

Hopefully you win

the talking into thing with your wife. 70 years is a long time. The Energy Kinetics systemm 2000 is very simple. The only thing that is differant from normal is that it heats its domestic hw with a plate heat exchanger and it has an energy management board. You can purchase a cheater board if it makes you feel better in case it went bad. I have a system in my house and am very satisfied. It is also very efficient. Cut my oil use almost in half.
Good Luck.
No matter what system you choose it is time to upgrade.

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Boilerpro_3

I'd start with

improving insulaion and weatherstripping. Investments made here often pay for themselves in less than a year. Then get a new boiler sized to the reduced heat loss of your home. Going from poorly insulated, open gaps at baseboards, electrical outlets, etc. and unweatherstripped windows to properly insulated and sealed and weatherstipped windows can reduce your heat loss from 30 to 50%.

We have been heating our 2,800 sq ft wood frame two story with 700 sq ft of glass in Northern IL with a boiler having about 70,000 btu/hr gross output for several winters now. It originally was at 215,000 btu/hr output when we purchased the home 12 years ago. . Despite the price of gas going up 225% in the past 3 years, we are now paying about the same for heating our home as the previous owner did 20 years ago.
Just a few months ago I finally augmented the 42 year old gas fired boiler with a new 95% efficient model. The old reliable American Standard brand boiler is still connected to the system and serves as a backup, should the new boier go down. This is something I am recommending to many clients who have functional and safe existing boilers but want new due to concerns about future reliability and desire improved efficiency. We will now see how much the fuel usage drops again in the coming winter.

Oh. Far more important than the brand of boiler you install, is a good installer and servicer. Good boilers are infinitely easier to find in my area than good installer/ servicers. I recently stopped at a business were I lost the bid to install a new heating plant. The piping looked nice, but probably voided the manufacturer's warranty and the venting system probably violated code. The pumps used were larger than necessary, using money that could have been spent doing the job right. I expect the boiler will last maybe 10 to 15 years when it should last 30 to 40 if installed correctly.

Boilerpro

Robert O'Connor_3

3 pass oil fired boilers

Are the tops in efficency: Buderus, Crown Freeport, Biasi.
Get an indirect HW tank: tank in tank so you don't scale up a coil: triangle tube or burnham alliance. I wouldn't suggest running insulated PEX out to the garage. You'd have to run glycol and/or a flat plate heat exchanger to isolate. Probably need a fan coil to raise the temp quickly. Stick with a direct vert kero wall heater from Monitor products.

John Livingston

To answer a couple of questions:

The chimney has been cleaned/examined recently and is in good shape.

We have been intending to stick with an oil-fired unit, but we do have natural gas available.

I recently finished rebuilding one set of windows and am very receptive to the replacement/upgrade suggestions.

Finding a quality installer might be a bit problematic. Using Dan's search engine put the nearest business associated with this group in Richmond, which is about 90 miles away. I'll check with the Richmond folks to see if they get down this far, or if they know someone in the area they'd be comfortable with.

Is there any point in my downloading one of the heat-loss calculators and trying to come up with something on my own, if just to give me something to compare the pros' results to?

Thanks to all who've responded. This is already a huge help.

John

Steamhead

Heat-Loss Calculators

Slant/Fin has one that's very easy to use, but they are about to release a new version. I'd wait for that to come out.

As other posts have said, it makes no sense to keep the boiler hot all the time to provide hot faucet water. The indirect heater is the way to go. I have a 40-gallon Triangle Phase 3 out there that the owners just can't run out of hot water- and they have 2 teenagers!

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