Adding Heat to a New Room

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actually circulator is a better term for this device. The concept clicked for me when Holohan described a circ like a ferris wheel. A ferris wheel does not need a lot of motor, or hp to spin it. The weight of the people coming down lifts the people going up. You'll notice how ferris wheel operators load a wheel, trying to balance the loads opposite. The same thing happens in your closed loop hydronic system.

A circulator mainly gives some incentive to the process by lowering, slightly the pressure at the inlet, and raising the pressure at the outlet.

The water gets to the top of you system by the static fill pressure. Many boiler gauges read in pressure and altitude.

You will notice 12 psi will get the water up to about 27 feet. Depending on the height above the boiler to the highest baseboard or radiator, will determine the fill pressure. Generally a few pounds of pressure above this to ease air removal.

Use a 2.31 factor to determine the pressure needed to lift water to the top. If you measure 24 feet from the base of the boiler to the highest lift, 24 divided by 2.31 = 10.3psi.

Grab a copy of Dan's "Pumping Away" for a better understanding how all this works, and also how to design a troublefree hydronic system.

What you need to do first is a heat load calc for the home and then the proposed addition. Determine that number and the output of the boiler should closely match.

I suspect cooling will be more of an issue than heating in attic space :)

hot rod

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John Jenkins

Adding Heat to an Attic

I am remodeling my attic. Right now it is used for storage only and is not heated. I have a 4 loop, hot water baseboard heat system and would like to add an extention to this system to heat my attic. How do I know if my system can handle that and what effect will the additional 8-9ft climb have on my circulation pump? I checked the specs for BTUs it says input:200000 and output:160000.

jeff_51

hot rod gave very good answer

jsut a couple of more things, obviously a seperate loop and zone for attic. Unless it is a really big attic, it shouldn't take alot of Btu's to heat it since heat rises. Yes, you do need to do a heat loss calc as Hot Rod suggested. You can get a free calculator from Slant Fin on this site. I would guess that you probably have enough boiler. You can of course go to a fan coil which you can heat with the boiler and do AC with at the same time, otherwise a mini-split will handle AC really nicely.