inadaquate amount of heat emitters vs. effeciency

Live/Learn

Dear wall,
If a home heated by forced hot water and using fin type baseboard emitters didn't have enough emitters in each room would this contribute to higher heating bills? I would think so as the system would have to run longer to heat the home as the existing baseboard would have to give out heat longer to satisfied the stat. Is there any problem with putting all the emitters that you can in each room? Or would this just balance out due to the extra piping and rads to heat? Live/Learn

Live/Learn

Does having not enough heat emitters effect heating cost.

Dear wall,
If a home heated by forced hot water and using fin type baseboard emitters didn't have enough emitters in each room would this contribute to higher heating bills? I would think so as the system would have to run longer to heat the home as the existing baseboard would have to give out heat longer to satisfied the stat. Is there any problem with putting all the emitters that you can in each room? Or would this just balance out due to the extra piping and rads to heat? Live/Learn

Mike T., Swampeast MO

Hard to Answer

If the emitters are truly inadequate, they won't be able to handle the heat loss on the coldest days.

In reality, the vast majority of emitters are greatly oversized in most weather.

You MUST consider the structure, the emitters and the boiler as a system working in concert. Just "packing in" the baseboard wall-to-wall doesn't make much sense as the radiation is likely to be unbalanced between the spaces. Poor balance leads to poor efficiency.

Some of the keys to efficient design:

1) Conduct a thorough, room-by-room heat loss.

2) Size the radiation to provide the needed amount of heat for each space at design conditions. Since most b/b is installed in a one-pipe loop you must consider the supply temperature available to each element. Within reason, you can adjust the sizing to work at different initial supply temperatures.

3) Do not oversize the boiler! Oversizing the boiler is the cause of MUCH waste--that's why modulating boilers that can change their output to suit the load are so efficient--even with baseboard systems typically thought of as "high temperature". Just watch out that you don't extract too much heat from the supply and wind up low return temps that cause condensation problems in traditional boilers.

"I would think so as the system would have to run longer to heat the home as the existing baseboard would have to give out heat longer to satisfied the stat." Actually, that's what you want to happen. Longer firing times are directly related to higher efficiency.

Weezbo

well, oversizing the amount of convectors alone isnt going

to harm a system that has a Control stradgey to incorperate the additional emitters...designing it to be balanced, that steps up to where knowledge and math = function. here is one example,20 ' of wall,16' of that wall is glass,room next to it 20 ' or perimiter wall no window,next to it 2 10 ' walls of the exterior perimiter, one 4 X4 window in each wall.are the rooms the same?well no , not exactly....so will wall to wall baseboard work and be efficient ? it would take one extremely educated sob to convince me that he had the mathamatical figures to back that idea up.....even chucking in a few variables in his favor so ..........the answer is without some idea of the heat loss of a room you really cant just rely on fewer emitters to maintain cirulation and reduce costs or oversizing them in one room to make up for thier non existence in another. nope. thats just not Scottish

Live/Learn

adding more heat emitters

Dear Weezbo,
Thanks for getting back to me. I did a heat loss calculation and I know that I am very "light" in at least one room in my home. I did some alterations and so lost some heat . Now I don't have any exterior walls to add more heat to. Can I install baseboard on interior walls and still get decent heat from them? My return water seems very hot and I'm sure I have plenty to spare before condensation occures. Live/Learn

Mike T., Swampeast MO

Outside Walls

Are the norm because it's assumed that's where it's best to counteract the cold outdoors. (Infiltration from windows and the desire to temper the cold walls with convection.)

If you run out of outside walls but still need more baseboard, ZERO harm putting more on inside walls. No need to de-rate them because they're not on outside walls.

Weezbo

That will work ... from time to time i get these er um...

inheritances and well what to do? ............well depending on a few variables it will indeed add btu,s to an area.some times on the other side of a partition wall is a convient piece of base board or convector turn it 90 back into the room you want heat in roll (180) the copper right back over the top turn 90 ,and tie it right back into the existing piece of base board that you pulled the supply for the room with the new base board.

ALH_3

Bottle-neck

It might be easier to think of your system in terms of BTU's. Your undersized baseboard elements can only deliver a certain amount of heat per hour at a given room temperature and water temperature. The boiler can only burn as much fuel as the baseboards can release from the system. Therefore if you increase your emitters' output you will also enable the system to accept more input. You'll burn more fuel if your current baseboard is undersized and you add more. This assumes your boiler has adequate output to heat your home.

-Andrew