I ask for a quick verification of my numbers....
4 gallons of water in a piping system. So 8 BTU/degree/gallon or with 4 gallons, 32 BTU/degree.
So if the water in the pipe is dropping 1 degree per second, that's 32BTU/sec*3600sec/hour or 115K BTU/HR loss. (Of course the water temp would be mighty cold in 100 seconds at this rate....) But if the water was maintained at this temp by, say a secondary loop injection, such that the temp. didn't drop, but when the heat injection is shut off, and the temp is measured to drop at this rate....it means it is 115K BTU/HR to maintain this temp. Right?
The rest is just the rest of the story....
Well, with my old piping (still in my system...), with the temp at 175, I measure 1 degree/sec drop when the injection from the Garn shuts down. That's an enormous loss!
Of course when it drops down to 130, the rate of drop falls considerably.
But without a doubt, it does seem like I'm dumping a boat load of heat into the ground, the air, the oil boiler, etc.
For those interested in what the setup is....I have about 80' of buried 1" pex line poorly insulated, which is in my PRIMARY LOOP, out to the oil boiler in an outside shed. Add the additional 20' of copper, at the boiler (outside) and the primary loop inside, that's about 4 gallons of water (0.04/foot for 1" pex). One of these days, I'll get around to switching over to the microflex that will replace this line. But it does seem like, given the 4 gallons in the line, and the drop of 1 degree/second measured on a sensor (the primary pump stays on when the injection loop shuts off), this drop is enormous.
So all the while I'm heating my floor, with hours of injection time every day, even with a degree every 4 seconds, that 30K/hour that is being lost. Or over say 5 hours a day, that's 150K.
4 gallons of water in a piping system. So 8 BTU/degree/gallon or with 4 gallons, 32 BTU/degree.
So if the water in the pipe is dropping 1 degree per second, that's 32BTU/sec*3600sec/hour or 115K BTU/HR loss. (Of course the water temp would be mighty cold in 100 seconds at this rate....) But if the water was maintained at this temp by, say a secondary loop injection, such that the temp. didn't drop, but when the heat injection is shut off, and the temp is measured to drop at this rate....it means it is 115K BTU/HR to maintain this temp. Right?
The rest is just the rest of the story....
Well, with my old piping (still in my system...), with the temp at 175, I measure 1 degree/sec drop when the injection from the Garn shuts down. That's an enormous loss!
Of course when it drops down to 130, the rate of drop falls considerably.
But without a doubt, it does seem like I'm dumping a boat load of heat into the ground, the air, the oil boiler, etc.
For those interested in what the setup is....I have about 80' of buried 1" pex line poorly insulated, which is in my PRIMARY LOOP, out to the oil boiler in an outside shed. Add the additional 20' of copper, at the boiler (outside) and the primary loop inside, that's about 4 gallons of water (0.04/foot for 1" pex). One of these days, I'll get around to switching over to the microflex that will replace this line. But it does seem like, given the 4 gallons in the line, and the drop of 1 degree/second measured on a sensor (the primary pump stays on when the injection loop shuts off), this drop is enormous.
So all the while I'm heating my floor, with hours of injection time every day, even with a degree every 4 seconds, that 30K/hour that is being lost. Or over say 5 hours a day, that's 150K.
