I just refinanced my home and have a few dollars left over which I plan on spending on updating the boiler and DHW.
Home is 5,000 sqft with spray foam insulation installed in 2008 (2x6 walls), including rafters.
3000 feet are Warmboard radiant with remainder baseboard and cast iron radiators. I installed Tekmar controls to run everything and have 14 heat zones (9 radiant, 1 baseboard, 1 cast iron (2 bedrooms), basement cast iron radiators (don't use really) and 2 coils in AC units which never get used (put in just in case the radiant was not enough to maintain temps -- but it does -- worked real well until I got the radiant hooked up!
According to last winter's billing, I used 552 Therms over 61 days (Jan-Feb) with a total of 1704 HDD.
Current boiler is a 200K monster cast iron (hot water) WM which I know is grossly oversized.
Design temp for my area is 15 degrees.
Based on the above, If I'm understanding what I've read, I calculate a need for only 54K BTU boiler on the replacement which really scares me as you all know what will happen if I put one in and the house is ever "cold".
I'm also interested in replacing the hot water heater (gas fired) 75K unit as we frequently run out of hot water when everyone is trying to shower in a short period.
So I'm thinking of the following:
Burnham ESC4 for heat and a tankless heater for DHW
In addition, due to having some very small radiant zones (2K BTU), I'm thinking of also adding in a buffer tank of 40 -50 gallons.
Alternatively, I could upsize to a larger ESC5 or ESC6 and a dual coil tank for both buffering as well as DHW?
I'm posting here because none of the local guys will do anything other than eyeball the house and offer to put in another 200K unit.
Home is 5,000 sqft with spray foam insulation installed in 2008 (2x6 walls), including rafters.
3000 feet are Warmboard radiant with remainder baseboard and cast iron radiators. I installed Tekmar controls to run everything and have 14 heat zones (9 radiant, 1 baseboard, 1 cast iron (2 bedrooms), basement cast iron radiators (don't use really) and 2 coils in AC units which never get used (put in just in case the radiant was not enough to maintain temps -- but it does -- worked real well until I got the radiant hooked up!
According to last winter's billing, I used 552 Therms over 61 days (Jan-Feb) with a total of 1704 HDD.
Current boiler is a 200K monster cast iron (hot water) WM which I know is grossly oversized.
Design temp for my area is 15 degrees.
Based on the above, If I'm understanding what I've read, I calculate a need for only 54K BTU boiler on the replacement which really scares me as you all know what will happen if I put one in and the house is ever "cold".
I'm also interested in replacing the hot water heater (gas fired) 75K unit as we frequently run out of hot water when everyone is trying to shower in a short period.
So I'm thinking of the following:
Burnham ESC4 for heat and a tankless heater for DHW
In addition, due to having some very small radiant zones (2K BTU), I'm thinking of also adding in a buffer tank of 40 -50 gallons.
Alternatively, I could upsize to a larger ESC5 or ESC6 and a dual coil tank for both buffering as well as DHW?
I'm posting here because none of the local guys will do anything other than eyeball the house and offer to put in another 200K unit.