Recent content by Matt Meier

Tangent accepted. I, also, am curious about this.

You are invaluable. I love doing my own work and I like to fix stuff, but sometimes there's no substitute for a pro. I've never been upset that I paid someone to come in and do the work, and I've never looked at an estimate or bill and thought "Jeez...I coulda done that for..." Instead, it's...

I have a 4" cast iron stack that split open between the first and second floors. So, I took it out. Now I need to put something in its place before I forget there's not a drain and flush the toilet again... My problem is that the old system had a side-inlet elbow where the lav/toilet turned...

I missed that. I guess I didn't read that part closely enough. I wouldn't be surprised about a typo. There are a couple places in the manual that aren't very clear. It looks like our manuals are identical. If they are, there's a chart on page 62 with the full description of step modulation...

Yep, I've enabled the step modulation, but I set a 10° temperature drop before the boiler resumes firing (the factory was set to 30°F), just because I didn't want the temperature to yo-yo while I was adapting the software and taking some measurements. It's obviously not necessary, considering...

Well, after the past couple months it's safe to say this was a success. I'm still working out the control software, but the system does run the house (even if I have to go into the basement to make adjustments). The good news is that the boiler hasn't shut down since I turned it on, except...

Update: The condensate is going into a PVC floor drain, so that should be fine. I moved the mechanical room to the other basement, so everything is venting out an old basement window that had been broken and boarded up. I replaced it with some glass block and ran the pipes through that. I...

Well, I found a lot of asbestos, so I've been not working in the basement for a while. Now that it's cleared up, and I'm back to the project, I should clarify a few things. First, I shouldn't have referenced improving the efficiency by 10%. First, that's fundamentally incorrect. For example...

Never mind the pump comment. I think I've found one line that will work.

I'm convinced. The simple simulation says that I can improve the efficiency up to about 11% by varying the system flow based on operating conditions. It's not a completely intelligent simulation. It doesn't try to optimize the flow, or balance the system over time. Those are things I...

It's specifically the design of the delta-P pumping style that was making me question it. It's lacking in the sense that it always provides the same flow, regardless of the boiler's operating point. This article, specifically, got me wondering about the issue a little deeper...

Dana, I'm completely up to speed on the old hot water heater issues; I actually had to remove a chimney (or should I say breath on and watch it collapse) for an orphaned water heater when I bought my first house, so I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about having to replace it because of the...

Thanks for the pump page. I had misinterpreted that; I thought the CP mode jumped from one speed to the next, but that's obviously not right. Our basement is remarkably dry. I lazily leave boxes on the floor sometimes, but they're fine. I throw my rags and work clothes in a corner when I...

All the estimates were post-near-term-improvements, so I feel OK about those. If I drop to 68° and adjust the windows to R3, I cut about 10kBTU/h off. I didn't ignore the basement losses completely. Just the basement-to-soil losses. The basement was losing about 22,000BTU/h through the...

I also found an error in my original heating history estimate. When I ran the heat calculation, I scaled the result too much. I had quickly assumed that I would need twice the heat to bring the rest of the house up to a comfortable temperature. However, that's obviously not true, because it...