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Snow Melt....HELP!

Joe Royal
Joe Royal Member Posts: 1
in THE MAIN WALL
I'm "just a dumb plumber" but was wondering if you folks could help me. I need a new driveway and thought while I was at it I'd install a snow melt system (or at least the tubes for now while we save up for a boiler to handle the load). My question being the heatloss calculation. As I've said I'm "just a dumb plumber" but have had alot of heating experience (just not the doing the heatloss kind)and can handle the installation with a little (or alot) of help from the great minds that are "The Wall". The driveway is aprox. 82' long and 8' wide and was thinking about size of tube at 5/8"?? tube spacing at 8"-10"?? I'd like to limit my loop lenghts to 300'?? (but not sure how many) I'm going to put down several inches of crushed QP and install 2" insulation on top of it then wire mesh and fasten the tube to the mesh. Install perimiter insulation on the edges. I'm ripping out my walkways as well and depending on the load I may only do 2/3 of the driveway to keep the operating (and install costs down)so we could do the walkways too. I live in northern new jersey and anyone (short of the supply house people) wants the whole job which we certainly couldn't afford in order to calculate heat loss and give us different options. Another concern is the boiler The chimney cannot support an additional load so a direct vent condensing boiler may be our only option. The walkways are 10'x 3' and 23'x 4' any help will really be appreciated . We just moved into "this ol broken down house" and do not have computor access so I'm at our local library. Thank You!Joseph Royal aka "just another dumb plumber"

sorry for such a long post.

Comments

  • hr
    hr Member Posts: 6,106
    It's a rich mans sport

    melting snow, that is. Figure around 100 BTU's per square foot. Or more if you like to see it go away quickly, without accumulations :)

    So if you end up with 1500 square feet of area, you will need around 200,000 input, give or take.

    Now pencil in you local fuel costs to get an idea of operating costs.

    Just about all the radiant manufactures have snowmelt calculators on their design software. SOMEONE in north Jersey must have a copy of this to help with design?

    Also figure out where the melt waters will end up. The city will hate you if the ice dam, from melting, ends up in the street of gutter! It's enough to spin a snowplow truck right around when they hit those ice walls.

    hot rod

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