Update to Heating System at the Little House in the Village

TWStud — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:41:01 +0000

I’ve updated the heating system at the Little House in the Village. The previous setup cycled too quickly due to the high heat output from the boiler and the low heat consumption of our small house’s radiators. The boiler needs the high heat output to be able to create hot water on demand and, while the boiler is capable of modulating its heat output over a 5 to 1 range, it wasn’t able to go low enough to heat the house efficiently when there were moderate temperatures outside.

With this new setup, I’ve added a buffer tank in the crawlspace to provide some thermal mass to store heat during heating cycles. In theory, this should allow the boiler to burn for a longer time and then stay off for a very long time – much more efficient this way. Unfortunately, as I’ve cited before, “In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is.”^[1] In this case, the boiler does burn efficiently to get the tank up to temperature, but then reverts to short burns to keep it warm. Some tweaks are definitely needed…

In any case, here is the current setup. I really didn’t want any equipment in the crawlspace, but, being a passive tank, the problems should be few – “In theory…”

Notes:

[1] “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” Variously attributed to Jan la van de Snepscheut, Albert Einstein, and Yogi Berra.

HVAC has arrived!

TWStud — Tue, 08 May 2012 22:05:39 +0000

The 3 1/2 tons of Heat Pump equipment arrived today! I probably won’t install right away since, as you can see below, I still have to build the doors for the Workshop loading bay.

The Heat Pumps are LG Mini Split systems. The Workshop gets its own 2 ton unit (21 SEER) and the Office and Finishing rooms each have a 3/4 ton unit coupled to a single compressor (18.9 SEER). I’ll have more when I install these.

Two pallets of HVAC equipment... PS: I didn't drive on the highway like this. I just used my pickup to shuttle the equipment from the delivery truck.

TWStud's Musings » HVAC

Update to Heating System at the Little House in the Village

Notes:

HVAC has arrived!