After ModCon Boiler install, should I upgrade baseboards?

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amazer98

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Hi All,

I'm new to this forum and have a question I was hoping you could answer.

Six years ago my wife and I moved into this 1600sf condo in Maine. The heating system was an oil-fired boiler that fed into 4 zones-- one zone for each of the two bedrooms, one zone for the entire common area downstairs (kitchen, dining room, living room, front hallway), and one zone for an indirect water heater.

The common area is at least six times the size of either bedroom, and opens up to a vaulted ceiling with an adjacent loft. In this zone, there are five runs of baseboard totaling perhaps 50-60 feet. The hot water runs from one baseboard to the next (i.e., daisy-chained), so that by the time it reaches the last baseboard it was cooled down considerably.

Even with the oil boiler, which heated up to 198-202 degrees, the house would get a bit chilly on the very coldest days when the outside temps dropped below 10 degrees or so. The system couldn't warm the place more than approximately 68 degrees. Our heating contractor told us there was not enough baseboard in this central zone.

Two years ago natural gas was brought into our town, and we converted to a Veissmann mod con boiler. This unit heats the water to only 171 degrees and can't be adjusted to go any higher. With my Nest thermostat I can see how many hours the boiler runs each day. Even this time of year, when the temps drop only to the low 30s at night (and typically mid 40s in the day), the unit is running 14 or 15 hours to keep the house at 70. On the coldest days, the house gets to only 65 or so. We can increase the temp by turning on our gas fireplace.

Our new heating company says the best fix is to install high-output baseboard and connect it differently. Rather than daisy-chaining the baseboard radiators, he suggested installing a plenum, which would be looped to each of the five baseboards in the zone. That way, each baseboard would get 171 degree water rather than progressively cooler water, as they do now. This upgrade would cost approximately $5K and I am a bit reluctant to spend the money after already 'upgrading' the boiler.

So... my question is: would we significantly cut our gas consumption if we upgraded the baseboards? Maybe the new system would emit heat so much more efficiently that the boiler would need to run only a fraction of the time... I don't know.

Based on what I described, what would you recommend?
 

Fitter30

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Common area is it's own zone the temperature drop from entering water and leaving should be 20*. Need to measure temps on the piping. Take a few pics of your boiler and pumps and pjpjng.
 

amazer98

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Thanks for the replies, guys. The boiler is a Vitodens 100-W and its rated input is 21 to 125 MBH - 6.2 to 36.6 kW (whatever that means). And, yes, we have fin tube baseboards. Our heating tech said they were the 'heavy duty' model, which put out a bit more heat per linear foot than the standard one.

I don't know what the temperature delta is on the returning water, but the run is long enough that it might exceed 20 degrees.

Andy
 
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First thing to look into is heat loss and look if air sealing and/or more insulation is needed. Is there a basement? is it on a slab/crawl space? The boiler can output more than enough heat for 1600 sq-ft. The vaulted ceiling and loft aren't helping keep the warmed air in the lower area. Is the condo an end unit or are there units on both sides of you? Do your neighbors have the same issues (if they have the same layout)?
 

amazer98

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First thing to look into is heat loss and look if air sealing and/or more insulation is needed. Is there a basement? is it on a slab/crawl space? The boiler can output more than enough heat for 1600 sq-ft. The vaulted ceiling and loft aren't helping keep the warmed air in the lower area. Is the condo an end unit or are there units on both sides of you? Do your neighbors have the same issues (if they have the same layout)?

The unit is pretty well insulated. I had a blower fan test and infrared heat loss analysis done about 3 years ago. The place is reasonably tight and the walls and ceilings have decent insulation. Walls are 6" and have fiberglass and foam board.

There is a full basement and I even had the sills foamed after the heat loss tests. All our units were built in the mid to late 80s and initial came with electric baseboard. Some owners kept the electric and added Monitor kerosene heaters. Others installed oil boilers like we had when we moved in here 6 years ago. More recently, when natural gas was introduced here, about 65% of the owners had mod con boilers installed. We all used various vendors, so some units have more baseboard than others. We simply hooked the Veissmann mod con to our existing baseboard.

I'm now thinking that I'll simply keep things as they are. We can supplement on the coldest days with our gas fireplace, which cranks out good heat. It would only make sense to me to upgrade if we could significantly cut our gas usage.
 
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It does sound like the the baseboards are the limit. Make sure they are clean and free of obstructions. After that you are pretty much limited to either adding more or swapping them out to higher output ones.

Another option would be to install radiant floor heating on the underside of the lower level floor.

Mini-split heat pump is another way to supplement heating, bonus would be getting A/C if you don't have it already.
 
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