Hydronic Heating with water heaters.

Tony pipes

Hopefully you've done the proper heat loss where you say you need about 65' of base board. If you have done the heat loss correct that amount of base board is the amount you need based on 180 degrees water temp. You are not going to get that out of a water heater. I would call the base board manufact. and find out how many btu's/ foot of baseboard with a 130 degrees water temp and then size your job accordingly. Also when you figure out the correct btu's you need, you need to convert into watts (btu's x .293071= watts) to see if the water heater is going to work. I have had the water heater manufact. make my water heaters special for sum occasions, like for example you may need 12000 watts which is (2) 6000 watt elements. Do the math, Good Luck, hoped this helps.

RonBH

Hydronic heating with water heaters.

I have to design a hydronic heating system for a commercial space that uses an oil fired-flying coffin,
(a suspended furnace), to heat both warehouse space and a much smaller area of office space. The problem is I do not want to cut into the existing oil lines to feed another oil fired heat exchanger beacuse these lines are probably at least forty years old and half clogged with sludge. I do not want to create a nuisance saftey problem for the furnace.

I am planning on using a standard 50 gallon electric fired water heater as my heat exchanger for a 65 foot baseboard hydronic zone, as this will eliminate the venting problem as well. I have done this before with both natural gas and oil but never with electric.

Will it work???

Steve Garson

You would probably have better efficiency and save a lot of installation expense by just installing electric baseboard, since you are planning on an electric water heater.

The heat levels will fluctuate more, but if you are heating water with electricity and then piping it to radiators, you will experience more loss than just heating the baseboard.

DrV

Hydronic heating with water heaters.

Use a commercial tankless water heater like the Accutemp "C" models. Tank type water heaters become lousey on-demand water heaters once their stored energy is depleted. I've been using an Acutemp C-150 to provide combined space & water heating since 1996. The system is illustrated @ http://gfxtechnology.com/combi.html & http://gfxtechnology.com/Combis.PDF. Our heat loss with a -45 wind chill is about 12kW (41,000 BTUH), so a 15 kW tankless is all we need since our DHR system cuts the shower load in half to under 10 kW year-round.