Adding new radiant heat zones to existing system

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JustinCO

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I'm adding two zones for baseboard heating to an existing radiant floor heating system and hoping to get some questions answered.

We bought the house about a year ago and it has a large 1200 square foot room above the garage that was intended to be finished out as a large gym/rec room by the prior owner but he never got around to it. I am partitioning it into two rooms to be more useful to us, each on a separate heating zone.

Here are some pertinent facts about my system:
Closed water system on a Crown boiler
Currently has 9 zones and we are adding two more
Two new zones are on the high heat manifold at 180 degrees and already have shut off valves and thermostat control valves installed
Prior owner already sized everything properly to allow for new zones
Two new zones already have radiant tubing run to the locations under windows where baseboard heaters go, and are capped off but empty of fluid

I hope that's enough but in essence, I am just adding the baseboards to a system that I believe is almost complete except for the heaters. My questions have to do with what I should do at this point. For each zone I see a supply line and a return line coming up from the floor. Do I just attach my baseboard heater to each of those lines, turn the valve on at the manifold and let her rip, or do I somehow fill the lines up with water before attaching the heaters? I suspect that somehow the air in the lines will cause problems but I need advice on how that is handled. I don't know how to bleed air from my system.

Thanks for any advice, other than calling a plumber! Money's too tight for that right now.
 

Dana

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Nine zones of low mass heat emitters like fin-tube baseboard is a recipe for short-cycling the boiler into low efficiency and an early grave. Increasing the number zones only makes it worse. If it doesn't already have one, this system may need a buffer tank to deal with the large number of high-temp zones reasonably, before even getting into what it takes for the low-temp radiation. This isn't a plumbing job- it's a hydronic heating design problem.

What is the boiler's DOE output spec, and how many feet of baseboard on EACH ONE of the zones? (eg, zone 1, 12'; zone 2, 27'; .... etc.)

Without knowing the lengths of the loops or how many have been paralleled through manifolds there is no saying whether just hooking it up in the same manner as the baseboard even has a prayer of working. Most radiant floor systems will work better at much lower water temps than you would run in baseboard, which would require a thermostatic mixing valve on the zone loop, and it may require pump changes to get the right flow, depending on the tubing layout.
 

JustinCO

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Thanks, sorry I didn't add enough information to warrant an answer to my question. Assuming it is properly designed - yes it has a buffer tank, mixing valves, high and low heat zones as appropriate, proper boiler sizing, etc., what would be the answer to my question about how to fill up the hoses and purge the air?
 
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