Recovering Engineer
New Member
I am one of those new millennial homeowners and I realize now just how little I know/understand about some of these basics so I apologize for any stupid questions here. This is my first winter in my house and this all started based on trying to figure out if my propane consumption is low/normal/excessive. I thought it would be relatively easy, figure out the BTU/hour of my appliances and compare to how much fuel I’ve consumed and estimate how long things are running. Then I looked at my boiler and it says 18,000 to 199,900 BTU/h and then I fell down a rabbit hole trying to determine how many BTU’s it should take to heat my house and found this forum.
So some details. We have a ~3,800 square foot house in the greater NYC area so we experience decent winters but not crazy. Everything but the lights basically are on propane (gas range, gas oven, gas dryer, combined heat/hot water boiler). We are bad millennials, along with owning a home we cook our own meals, so the stove gets used every day but that isn’t much consumption. The dryer probably uses a decent amount but I haven’t looked at the numbers yet. I figure the boiler is really going to dominate our propane usage and I’m not sure how to estimate it’s useage with that wide BTU range.
We have an NCB-240E combined boiler. Our HVAC system has 3 zones, 1 for the entire first floor, 1 for master bedroom and 1 for the rest of 2nd floor. We have programmable thermostats but my wife is at home with a toddler so zone 1 basically runs all day from 6:30am-10pm and with a 2-story entryway I’m sure some of that is drifting to the upstairs as well. Master bedroom zone runs only a couple hours a day since it is empty all day. The 2nd upstairs zone runs quite a bit to keep baby’s room warm for naptime, etc.
So is there a good way to figure out how much the boiler should be running to keep the house warm? And then to figure out from our actual propane consumption how much the boiler is running? I’m trying to both benchmark our consumption and try to plan/budget for propane for the next year. On a semi-related question, how much hot water output is reasonable for things like concurrent showers/sinks should I get from the NCB-240E?
So some details. We have a ~3,800 square foot house in the greater NYC area so we experience decent winters but not crazy. Everything but the lights basically are on propane (gas range, gas oven, gas dryer, combined heat/hot water boiler). We are bad millennials, along with owning a home we cook our own meals, so the stove gets used every day but that isn’t much consumption. The dryer probably uses a decent amount but I haven’t looked at the numbers yet. I figure the boiler is really going to dominate our propane usage and I’m not sure how to estimate it’s useage with that wide BTU range.
We have an NCB-240E combined boiler. Our HVAC system has 3 zones, 1 for the entire first floor, 1 for master bedroom and 1 for the rest of 2nd floor. We have programmable thermostats but my wife is at home with a toddler so zone 1 basically runs all day from 6:30am-10pm and with a 2-story entryway I’m sure some of that is drifting to the upstairs as well. Master bedroom zone runs only a couple hours a day since it is empty all day. The 2nd upstairs zone runs quite a bit to keep baby’s room warm for naptime, etc.
So is there a good way to figure out how much the boiler should be running to keep the house warm? And then to figure out from our actual propane consumption how much the boiler is running? I’m trying to both benchmark our consumption and try to plan/budget for propane for the next year. On a semi-related question, how much hot water output is reasonable for things like concurrent showers/sinks should I get from the NCB-240E?