Balancing pumped hot water system

[rjbphd]

"If the drawing is correct they may have simply removed the steam traps & vents, installeda hydronic boiler with the mother of all pumps and crossed their fingers." -Dana

Thats exactly what they did! Then someone came along and tee'd off of it to heat an addition. Half the house has cast iron radiators, and half has hydronic panels. Thanks for helping me confirm, and professionally explain that this system is hopeless. The house has two forced air a/c's. My recommendation is going to be to convert them to forced air heat & a/c, and abandon the boiler.

Changing from comfortable hydronic heating system to scorch air system is one of the biggest regret people made.

 

[Dana]

Changing from comfortable hydronic heating system to scorch air system is one of the biggest regret people made.

The key word being "comfortable". It sounds like this botched attempt at a conversion to pumped hydronic doesn't exactly fill that bill, and unless there's decent help to be had in fixing it...

Done right hot air doesn't have to be terrible (but most don't fit the definition of "right" either.)

If the thing is working well enough to get by, it's worth continuing the talent search for competent hydronic designer. It isn't necessarily very expensive to fix, but it takes some degree of competence to unravel the hack and fix it, rather than layering on more hacks. It's still worth doing the room by room Manual-J and the radiation analysis yourself. If you're uncomfortable doing the load numbers yourself, hire a P.E. or RESNET rater or some competent energy nerd to run the Manual-J, letting them know you want it to be as aggressive as defensively possible. You can bet the average hot-air hack won't run those numbers, leaving you with an oversized and unlikely unbalanced hot air system for your troubles. (Even those HVAC contractors who bother to run Manual-Js have a propensity to being ridiculously conservative, oversizing by more than 1.5x on the real loads, then using a multiplier on that already oversized number.)

The AC system may or may not have been done well, and even if the rooms are reasonably temperature balanced with the AC, the cooling loads aren't often sufficiently proportional to the heating loads to deliver decent heating season temperature balance using the same ducts & flow volumes.

If any of the ducts & air handler are in an attic above the insulation, outside the pressure & thermal boundary of the house the efficiency takes a big hit in both modes.

If the supplies & returns aren't flow-balanced well it will also drive outdoor air infiltration, resulting in excessively dry wintertime air.

All of that would have to be assessed before deciding to mothball the botched hydronic system rather than fixing it.

Full basement?

How many floors?

Window types?

Insulation levels?

 

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[Jm66208]

In my mind, the weakest link in this system is the piping. There just too many radiators per branch, and trying to balance them using the valves at each radiator is an exercise in futility.
One example is a bedroom on the second floor addition with a full bath all on one branch. If i throttle down the radiators in the bedroom just to get some heat in the bath, then the bedroom gets cold. Most other branches are similar.
The jouse is a two story with a full basement. 1920's. With addition done in 80's. The house is basically "warm", with the exception of one bedroom getting no heat, one bedroom kinda cold, and one cold bath. Space heaters are used in these rooms...

 

[rjbphd]

In my mind, the weakest link in this system is the piping. There just too many radiators per branch, and trying to balance them using the valves at each radiator is an exercise in futility.
One example is a bedroom on the second floor addition with a full bath all on one branch. If i throttle down the radiators in the bedroom just to get some heat in the bath, then the bedroom gets cold. Most other branches are similar.
The jouse is a two story with a full basement. 1920's. With addition done in 80's. The house is basically "warm", with the exception of one bedroom getting no heat, one bedroom kinda cold, and one cold bath. Space heaters are used in these rooms...

 

[rjbphd]

Your best bet now is to go over to heatinghelp.com site and there you can find a reputable hydronic heating companies in your area.