Let's Talk About Heating Shall We?

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Boiler sight glass

A childhood friend had a boiler in his family's single family house (don't know if steam or hot water). We were down there one day and he noticed the water in the sight glass was on the "summer" level though it was winter. He turned a valve, and the basement started to flood. Unturning the valve didn't stop the flow. I didn't stick around to see the aftermath.
 
My house is a 1000 sq. foot raised bungalow with a finished basement. When I bought the house it had baseboard electric as well as a home built wood stove in the basement. The wood stove worked great and heated the entire house because it had a furnace type blower attached to it and then ductwork that went to the living/dining and bathroom areas. I only used the stove when I was home so I was using a combination of wood and electricity. When I heard that electricity rates were going to rise substantially in the next few years I got rid of the wood stove, and baseboard heaters replacing them with hot water baseboards and a propane fire boiler (natural gas not available where I live). It was expensive to install but makes the house very comfortable when it is -30 C outside. I have 5 zones - 3 of which are on programmable thermostats - living/dining, bathroom, master bedroom and 2 with regular thermostats - guest bedroom, lower level. I am on equal billing, paying $260/month for 8 months with propane @ $0.639/litre. This winter the fixed rate is $0.569/litre and my monthly payment has dropped to $200. I also pay $138/month for electric on equal billing.

Gary

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Electric forced air here. I think this was quite common in my area once--the house I grew up in had oil heat originally (built about 1950) but was converted in the 70s. Electricity was apparently dirt cheap here once.

Gas forced air is probably a very common choice now.

Out where I am, gas is not an option (no service).

Heat pumps seem fairly common. I can't say for sure, but I'd suspect people choose gas first these days. But if not an option, they'll go with a heatpump. Winters are mostly mild enough for heatpumps to work acceptably.

Steam and hot water systems exist, but seem to be an "old house thing." I don't think I've ever seen a house out here with radiators that wasn't built well before World War II.

Wood stoves are also not uncommon, either as a primary source of heat, or supplementary/backup. A place where I lived a few years ago was actually built in the 70s as wood-heat only. (The builders were older, Depression era people who'd always used wood heat, I gathered.) The stove even had a coil to heat water, I believe. But at some point, they added a heat pump...maybe after all those years they were tired of splitting wood. LOL

One interesting note about wood heat: apparently in parts of the Tacoma, WA area, old wood stoves will be banned from use on (IIRC) October 1. The reasoning is air quality. There was apparently some program that helped people buy newer stoves, but, of course, only covered part of the expense.
 
In new home builds around here, natural gas is usually the choice if it is available and usually the heat delivery method is forced air however hot water radiant floor heating is becoming a lot more common. If natural gas is not available then it is either propane or oil. Electric baseboards used to be very common because it was the least expensive to install however with the electric rates skyrocketing, builders are moving away from electric. It is not uncommon for homes of 2500 sq. feet, which are heated by electric baseboards, to cost the homeowner $700-800/mth in electricity. I don't know how people can afford it.
 
Schadenfredude...

I'm sure many of you know what that refers to, a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people. Gulity as charged, so let's hear about those sky-high costs of winter heating in the East. It helps me to deal with the electric bill I will receive at the end of next month. Today is the last day of Edison's "reasonable" power period. Tomorrow starts the much more expensive "winter" rate schedule. It is 105 outside, hardly considered winter or even fall.  You should all feel sorry for me 
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Gas fired hot air system here. My 10 room house was built in 1897 and had in it a hand fired coal furnace gravity heat. I bet this place was a cold as could be then. The new furnace is sort of noisy but heats very well.
Washman: The high school that I taught in for years had 2 gas fired Kewanee steam boilers that were huge. As far as the steam being on or off was pretty much the same thing that you experienced. There were thermostats that were run off of an air compressor, but didn't seem to work well. I came to school one Mon. morning when the temp. outside was 5 below zero. My classroom was the farthest from the boilers and it was 95 degrees in there. The books and papers in my desk were quite warm to the touch. I had the windows opened a bit all winter long.
My neighbor's house, built in 1903 has a gas fired steam boiler, one pipe system. I really like to hear the buzzing and hissing etc. when the boiler calls for heat.
 
How/When does one add water?

One adds water when the boiler is off. The water pipe leads directly into the system. There's either a knob one opens manually and turns off when the water level is high enough or there's a float switch. Ideally the inlet pipe is run off the water heater. This allows one to add water even when the boiler is hot. Adding cold water to a hot boiler is asking for premature boiler failure.

The system is only under pressure when the boiler is producing heat. Otherwise pressure within the system is 14.7 psi just as it is outside. If one adds one cu. ft. of water to the system, one cu.ft. of air is displaced from the totality of the system through the radiator vents.

You are, of course, correct in that water pressure needs to be greater than that within the system. However, the WWI-era one-pipe systems Launderess at I refer to operate at 1-3 lbs of pressure and municipal water pressure is always rather greater. I was clicking some links and read mention that the steam heating system of the Empire State Building operates at 1.5 :-)

Jim
 
Not a heating boiler-Our GE SW transmitters use vapor cooling for the RF driver,PA and modulator and modulator driver tubes.The tubes are cooled by boiling water in their anode boilers to steam.Better cooling efficiency this way.We can add water to this at any time-even when the tx is running.the water first goes to a resevior tank-then into the system when needed.Would think a comfort heating system could work the same way.A small pump adds the water to the system from the resevior tank when the level gets low in the tube boilers.With the transmitter you have to be careful when adding water to it when you have drained the system for servicing.The power has to be on so the balance resevior pump will run and balance the levels.If the tube boilers get too full-they "boil over" causing "canvas tear" arcs!!
 
Older Northeastern cities probably are mostly steam-heated, but I grew up in a suburb of New Haven built in the early 1950's and we had passive oil/air heating. It was very quiet and seemed to work quite well (as long as we paid the oil bill, that is). Now here in California even in the big cities it is mostly gas heat of some sort, or electric heat exchanger where there is not gas service. In SF, often older apartments/flats were heated by a single passive heater, usually a floor heater. Which would mean that the other rooms in the house would be cool if not downright cold in the winters, mild as they are. Now I'm enjoying a forced air gas heating system and it works very well, although not exactly quiet and one can usually tell when it's on.

 

This house has two fireplaces and I retrofitted both with fairly efficient inserts. But as luck would have it the air pollution authority bans burning anything but natural gas in fireplace most of the time in the winter. If we have a wet winter, there may be fewer "no burn" times, but last winter was rather dry and I never bothered to fire up either fireplace, despite having plenty of firewood.

 

The last apartment my Mom lived in SF originally had a nice steam heat system,  something of a rarity there, with radiators in the living room and bedroom. But when the steam system broke down, the landlord gamed the rent control system and rather than repair the steam heating, switched all the apartments over to individual gas heaters. That way the landlord no longer had to pay for the fuel to heat the apartments, but kept the rent the same. The problem was the heater were installed in perhaps the worst locations in the apartments. In my Mom's case, it got put into the end of hallway near the entry, about as far as you could get from the living areas. Needless to say it didn't work worth a damn and she spent a lot of time standing by that contraption trying to keep warm. And so it goes.

 
 
In early days of steam heating it quickly got a bad name

Due to boiler explosions. This was because early designers ran systems with high pressure steam. Name escapes me but some bright blub came along and proved you could heat even the largest buildings with low pressure steam and that was that. IIRC systems do not go above one to three psi. That and of course making sure there is an automatic pressure relief valve that *works*. IIRC many local codes require testing of such and certification it is working.

This low pressure steam gave rise to "vapor" heating as it was called. Instead of a strong force of high pressure steam you hade a gentle flow of low. As mentioned above when such systems were working perfectly you never knew they were running. No banging, clanging, etc.. Just soft even heat.

http://www.achrnews.com/articles/103994-basic-steam-heat-revisited

http://inspectapedia.com/heat/Steam_Boiler_Repair.php
http://www.oldhouseweb.com/how-to-advice/steam-heating-dont-let-me-be-misunderstood-11678.shtml
 
Jim, Thanks for explaining the water control systems to me.  I am from  gas forced air parents.  The Grandparents burned wood in iron stoves.  The parents had  a  wood stove to keep the basement toasty. We had a shower stall down there nothing like a good hot shower in winter and toweling off next to wood heat. Pretty much a hillbilly sauna.  I miss the good steady wood heat and the folks.  -A
 
My pleasure

I got a lot of the background/theoretical knowledge from my grandfather. The hands-on, not so much, lol. He'd worked the kinks out of his system nearly 40 years previously and had forgotten most of what he'd done and why over the years. I did a lot of reading and had a lot of trial & error.

The two biggest points for the homeowner/renter with single-pipe systems are these:
1. As mentioned by someone else, the valve at the bottom must remain open, otherwise one can't get heat or get rid of condensation and you'll get leaks.
2. One regulates the heat by means of the air valve at the opposite end of the radiator. Go to the coldest room, unscrew the air valve and blow into it. If you can't, it's clogged and you need a new one. Get one at Homo Depot or plumbing store for $2.99. Personally, I prefer Maid-O'-Mist brand adjustable.Screw the new valve in and try it for a few days. If the room is still too cold, you need to open the valve more (if adjustable) or exchange that valve for a faster one.

One thing you don't want to do is to have no valve in the radiator. No, there'll be no damage, but when the boiler turns off the steam will recede from the radiator, sucking air from the room in behind it. This'll make your radiator cool off faster and leave your room colder.

Jim
 
When I was born, i lived in a single family home with steam heat that was delivered from the local steam plant via pipes into each home into the neighborhood.  Several years later my parents moved and that house had hot water baseboard heat that was zoned into the three...first floor, second, and third.  Each floor had a t-stat and it controlled the temp of the floor.  My parents stayed in that house until each one died.

 

My first apartment was hot water radiator.  It was one system, 1 thermostat for a four floor building with 10 apartments. I think mine was the largest, on the 2nd floor in the rear of the building,  and it was always roasting.  In the dead of winter (except the week when it was -4F) I was walking around inside with shorts, no shirt, and half of the windows open, while the girl in the apartment directly over me was walking around in a sweater.

 

Next place was a two story condo with heat pump.  The building was a factory from the 1850s, but the interior was redone into condos so the heat pump was new.  It kept me nice and toasty and even provided heat without electric backup heat down to 12F - so no complaints with it and it cooled like a champ.

 

Next place was a 4 story house with OLD OLD heat pump.  It was done at 30F, so would use auxiliary heat after that.   The house had 3 fireplaces 1 was a raised hearth in the kitchen that looked great, except that you had to actually use the thing to keep the kitchen warm.  I hated that system but decided to sell the house instead of improving it. 

 

My next and current is a 3 story house in which I replaced the old natural gas forced air system a some years after buying it.  So I currently have natural gas forced air system  with central air.  My heating system is 2 stage and most of the time 1st stage is used.  At first I wasn't sure because the air delivered at the registers is about 90F and seems cool even though the blower speed it low, however there are no drafts and everything stays at a constant temperature because the T stat keep the temp variation about 1/2 degree instead of 1 or 2.

 

If needed the system will move into second stage which provides heat output around 112F and a faster blower speed but with the lower heat output and slower speed I think the room temperatures stay very stable with no hot or cold periods.

 

My favorite is baseboard hot water but can't really complain too much about my system because it can heat, cool, and keep the rooms at a fairly constant temperature.  If I buy new construction or build a new house it will be hot water radiant floor heat in each room.

 

One highrise condo near me uses heat pumps in each unit and the cost is paid by each owner but at a reduced cost negotiated with the electric company for the residents of the building.  Another high rise uses natural gas that heats water and pumps it into each unit which has a convectors in each room. The convector units have blowers that suck a portion of air from the outside then blows the heat into each room. In the summer cold water fills the pipes instead of hot.  The owners pay for heat and AC through their condo fee.

 

New construction condo units are also using heat pumps and letting the owners pay the bill.  Most other single family houses use natural gas in some form to heat, however my neighbor across the street uses fuel oil.

 

As far as heating:  I have this practice---no heat until November, so I won't turn the heat on until November 1. 

 

 
 
No Heat til November 1st

I'm wondering how long I've been able to delay the use of heat. All I can think is October-something.

A lot, of course, depends on the place one is living, and also the year. The last time I lived in a real house, the people in charge of the property were up here working in early October. They place they were staying was poorly insulated, and it was ugly at night. Even with a kerosene heater and a wood stove, they practically froze. Meanwhile, I think I was barely using heat at all.

I'm already using heat this year, although only a bit early in the day, and again late at night. If this place had real insulation, rather than a few pieces of toilet paper and prayer, I might not need heat yet.

When I was really young, my father apparently decreed the heating season ran October (at the earliest) to May. Years later, my mother groused, er, commented how miserable it was some years making it to October...
 
We are all electric and we don't get a higher baseline of KWH's until Nov. 1st, so we don't use the heat until Nov. 1st every year. We have electric hydronic baseboard heaters and they work pretty good. They are quiet and clean and if we use them wisely the bill isn't too high. We also have a pellet stove insert and that works very well, but we can't use it on No Burn Days that the Bay Area Air Quality Control district imposes when it hasn't rained for a while. We also are on TOU electric service, so Mon. thru Fri from 12 pm until 6 pm we don't use the electric heaters. as the rate is MUCH higher during the peak use period. When it's not a No Burn day we can use the pellet stove to keep warm, but on No Burn days we freeze our asses off until 6 pm.
 
"I didn't stick around to see the aftermath. "

A wise decision. When some parents then began handing out spankings sometimes anything that breathed was caught up in the net. *LOL*

Personally as a child had a very well developed sixth sense for when trouble was about to break out and made myself scarce. Yeah I may have been labeled a "snitch" or "goody-two=shoes" but at least I could sit down and or had dinner with dessert.

*LOL*
 
"Another high rise uses natural gas that heats water and pumps it into each unit which has a convectors in each room. The convector units have blowers that suck a portion of air from the outside then blows the heat into each room. In the summer cold water fills the pipes instead of hot. The owners pay for heat and AC through their condo fee."

That's what I have now. But I believe the air is totally recirculated. But that doesn't matter because the place is very drafty and the old fashioned kitchen and bath vents suck enough air out that fresh air is is in overabundance. As some of you know, I have two 30-pint dehumidifiers going 24/7 whenever I'm home because this type of cooling does little for humidity.

Electric hydronic heat is better than conventional electric baseboard, IMO. With conventional you often feel a chill the moment it cuts out, whereas with hydronic the heat tapers off gradually. I'm not aware of any studies, but I wouldn't be surprised if less electricity is used as a result.

Radiant floor heat: That's what I'd like myself. Yes, it takes longer to heat the place up, but people are often comfortably warm at lower air temps because the floor (and everything everything on it, eventually) is warm to the touch.

Jim
 
My family moved into a ranch style house in 1958 that was built in 1947. It was built on a concrete slab foundation and had radiant heat in the floors. I was 7 years old and I can still remember that it was the most comfortable heat that I have ever experienced before or since. There was never a cold spot anywhere in that home. However, the boiler would overheat sometimes and it would clank loudly. My dad showed me how to turn it down, since I was th oldest kid. It used to scare me when I had to do this because the pressure gauge would show in the red danger zone and I was afraid it would explode, but I never had a mishap, thankfully. Once, a pipe broke in the kitchen floor and the floor had to be jack hammered in order the get to the broken pipe to repair it.
 
My house has a four zone water filled radiator system which originally dates from the mod 1970s but has been upgraded with a new boiler and solar panels for the hot water tank.

It uses a Veissmann modulating, condensing natural gas boiler with two circuits.

The first circuit heats 3 radiator zones - each has its own circulation pump.
The second circuit feeds a heat exchanger in the hot water tank. When the thermostat on the tank needs heat, the boiler switches over to heating the hot water loop only. It increases its output temperature to close to 90 degrees C to rapidly bring the hot water tank up to temperature.

The radiators are all slim Runtal flat units with a graphite panel on the front. This allows them to be much less obtrusive than typical radiators and each also has its own thermostatic valve.

We've three programmable room thermostats as master controls across the whole system as well as a hot water control system that manages the needs for the domestic hot water tank and balances with the solar panels.

The room stats follow a programme during the day and keep the house at 22C and drop or back to 19C at night as I don't like being too hot at night.

There are also timers but, because I've a home office the house is rarely unoccupied so, the system usually just runs on stats.

A lot of people here would use timers so the heat will stop when they're not at home and come back on just before they get home from work / school etc.

In general it's not cold enough here in Ireland to warrant needing to run for heating 24/7.

Also, this house is pretty well insulated - I upgraded to near passive levels - triple glazing, wall insulation, massively upgraded roof insulation etc etc

I've cut my energy bills by 60% and the house is actually much warmer even with that huge cut in bills!
 
I'll be switching on the

union made Goodman furnace tonight. Will marvel at the 96% algore approved efficieny rating that allows me to stay warm all the while reducing my carbon footprint.
 
I guess the best type of system to have depends partly on the climate where you live.  Here in Spain we have central A/C in our apartment for the summer.  In the winter it runs "in reverse" to provide heating (heat pump, forced air).  The mild temperature during winter allows the heat pump to run very efficiently.  Works great. 

 

Including tax, we pay €0.16/kWh at all times for all consumption (US $0.18/kWh).

 

Spain has invested heavily in renewables and a couple of times has been generating more electricity through wind turbines than the whole of Spain has been consuming.

 
 
Yes, definitely climate but also individual differences. For example, I frequently have cold feet while the rest of me is more than warm enough. I suspect I'd be an ideal spokesman for radiant floor heat, lol. I've seen electric radiant heat floor kits that can be used when putting down a new floor of almost any type. They're not for all situations but do allow for warm floors in situations once impossible or did not make economic sense.

Another factor that sounds bizarre is that of fuel availability. In many places any given fuel is either available reliably or not at all. It's very cut and dry. In other times/places, not so much. My cousins in Poland spent years building a house during the waning years of the communist regime. Fuel supplies were not reliable at all. Their heating system was hot water baseboard fired by TWO different boilers: One was gas. The other could burn either coal or wood. Both boilers had hot water coils for domestic supply. There were 2 tankless hot water heaters, one gas and one electric. To top it off, each room on the first floor had an electric outlet on its own circuit next to a window. Stored away were electric radiators that could be brought out and used in the event other fuels were not available. I forget the wattage, but they were the highest conventional plug-in radiators available at that time. Talk about back-ups having back-ups!

Jim
 
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