Low temp. hydronic heat emitters

[heaterman]

Heaterman,
" just a circ, a manifold and a TRV for each rad and presto, one can have as many “zones” as you wish."
Could you go into a bit more detail on how you add panel radiators to a system already using conventional fintube radiation?
Would they be on there own loop, with their own circulator?

Heaterman...............mumbling incoherently..................................as he tires to figure out how.................................................to convert the panel....................................rad drawing from cad to j...................................peg.............. and post it........................................here.




Still mumbling......................................still........................................................AHA



In this rudimentary drawing you'll see a primary secondary T arrangement with boiler flow going from bottom to top. This PS tee could be located where ever it would work in a given piping arrangement. Placing it on the supply side of things right off the heat source would of course yield the highest available temps but sometimes that is not desirable. Maybe the rest of the system needs the highest possible temp s in that case one would locate the PS tee after the rest of the heat emitters.

One could also just install the manifold as another branch in a normal supply/ return manifold setup. The supply would simply feed the rad manifold whenever an existing zone called for heat and the return line would dump back in along with the ZV loops or whatever else a person had going on.

 

[Gooserider]

Do they do TRV equivalents for radiant floors? I've been trying to figure out how to deal with whatever I end up with in our house, and part of the challenge is that it seems to me like every room in the house has seriously different heat loading. A lot of the tech advice I see from manufacturers and people like Siggy seems to be that one should minimize the number of different zones, but it seems like that would be difficult...

I mean - on the first floor alone, I have the

living room - 26' cathedral ceiling, big windows, lots of outside wall
Kitchen / dining room - 8' ceiling, outside wall only on two opposite ends, lots of heat making appliances
GF's office - outside walls on 2 sides, but pretty normal otherwise.
My office - like GF's office, but outside wall on three sides. However will be directly over boiler / storage room so should need a lot less heat in it's own right.
Bathroom - small, but important to heat...

I don't see how to do that without having a bunch of zones, but if one could essentially home run each room's loops (or possibly do a distributed manifold setup) with a TRV like control it would be a lot easier...

Gooserider

 

[Hansson]

Low temp. emitters would require less storage. Maybe our friend Hansson from Sweden will chime in. I wonder what type of radiators he uses. He has an extremely efficient heating system utilizing only about 500 gallons of storage.

This is how my radiators look like.
(broken link removed to http://www.lenhovdaradiatorfabrik.se/assets/bilder/miljo/sektion/hogt.jpg)

It`s not from my home but the radiators are the same.

In the cellar I got a radiator whit a fan from aermec.
http://www.aermec.com/prodotti/default.asp?id=133&ftype=fancoil&sun=oul
When the incoming water is 50 C it gives 3500 watts.

 

[heaterman]

Do they do TRV equivalents for radiant floors? I've been trying to figure out how to deal with whatever I end up with in our house, and part of the challenge is that it seems to me like every room in the house has seriously different heat loading. A lot of the tech advice I see from manufacturers and people like Siggy seems to be that one should minimize the number of different zones, but it seems like that would be difficult...

I mean - on the first floor alone, I have the

living room - 26' cathedral ceiling, big windows, lots of outside wall
Kitchen / dining room - 8' ceiling, outside wall only on two opposite ends, lots of heat making appliances
GF's office - outside walls on 2 sides, but pretty normal otherwise.
My office - like GF's office, but outside wall on three sides. However will be directly over boiler / storage room so should need a lot less heat in it's own right.
Bathroom - small, but important to heat...

I don't see how to do that without having a bunch of zones, but if one could essentially home run each room's loops (or possibly do a distributed manifold setup) with a TRV like control it would be a lot easier...

Gooserider

Yes TRV's like that are available. Basically you install the valve body at the manifold or whatever piping feeds your zone. A capillary tube runs up to the thermostat which is remotely mounted in a wall of the zone in question. Kind of tough to do in some retrofit applications but it can be done.

Zoning with trv's is just not a big deal. I'd say install as many as your house needs................and I can see what you mean by the room descriptions

 

[Gooserider]

Thanks... Sounds like that is what I would need to do for sure. Right now I haven't started sketching things out, but it seems like a lot of my layout would be most efficient if I had a large manifold in the boiler room with largish (3/4-1"?) PEX running to smaller manifolds in the target rooms, or between pairs of rooms that would break the large pipe down to a bunch of 1/2" or 3/8" loops to do the actual heating. This would minimize the size of the boiler room tubing bundle, and better fit the available spaces I have to do routing in... (I pulled 6K feet of networking wire into the walls a few years back, so I know pretty much what paths I have available to me)
Does this approach seem workable, or is there a better one?

Another question, sort of related... I've seen that there are a lot of manifold manufacturers out there, many of which seem to have some sort of per-loop actuators that go onto the manifolds. How "standard" is that connection between the actuators and the manifolds? Is it sort of like AC outlets where any brand of plug will fit into any brand of the same NEMA code # outlet? Or is it pretty much that to use an actuator from brand X, I would need to be using a brand X manifold as well?

Gooserider