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Forced hot water feed connected to return?

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natedawg1013
natedawg1013 Member Posts: 2
in Gas Heating
Is this normal? Ignoring connections to other rooms, the pipes for this forced hot water system go from the boiler, through the pumps, through a pipe that makes a short loop around the room (Insulated so not for heating), and back to the boiler hot water return. Would this cause significant loss in overall heating for the building? If this is common, what is the purpose?

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  • icesailor
    icesailor Member Posts: 7,265
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    You need to photograph the pipe and how it is connected at both ends.
  • unclejohn
    unclejohn Member Posts: 1,833
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    Sounds like he's describing primary secondary piping loop
  • natedawg1013
    natedawg1013 Member Posts: 2
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    From what I can see, that would be reasonable if there were circulator pumps on secondary loops, but I can't find any. Also, there are single connections off this loop that reconnect at the end, and one single pipe connected to it that splits into two, one marked feed and the other marked return. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Here is a paint mock-up as best as I can remember. I cannot get actual pictures of the setup right now.
    http://imgur.com/MgLSQpS
    Where the blue boxes are boilers and the teal ones are circulator pumps. In any given loop (except orange) any midpoint is safe to hold on to. In fact, I'd estimate about 70F whereas the water leaves the circulators at 170 and returns to the boilers at 120. Did this building's original plumber just have no idea what he was doing?
  • Gordy
    Gordy Member Posts: 9,546
    edited November 2014
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    First question is what is the problem?

    Is the system not heating?

    Just trying to understand the piping?

    Type of emitters ? Rads?

    Are boilers staged or fire together?

    Pipe sizes?

    This system "appears" to be parallel piped.

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