Looking for a boiler/hot water heater to heat house.

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Cpeters

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Currently trying to fix my weilmclain aquabalance which is acting up. Was looking for a direct vent unit without all the complicated computer stuff like my weilmclain. No primary and secondary loop stuff. I was
even thinking of a small tank heater. The problem with these boilers is, the techs need to contact the manufacturer for help and you can tac a couple hundred onto the service call. Any ideas? I currently have
a tank power vent hwh, PS, glad I didn't get a combi.
 

Sylvan

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This why I have 2 boilers in my home NEITHER is "State of the art"

Burnham and Slant Fin

Separate water heaters as I like to keep things simple
 

Fitter30

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Doesn't matter what mechanical or electronic thing your chatting about the more hi tech or efficient it is. Service and installers have to be sharper to understand them. Look for a contractor that is established. Primary secondary loops
are basic hot water boiler piping for muilti zone systems.
 

Sylvan

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Doesn't matter what mechanical or electronic thing your chatting about the more hi tech or efficient it is. Service and installers have to be sharper to understand them. Look for a contractor that is established. Primary secondary loops
are basic hot water boiler piping for muilti zone systems.


Let me tell you about " state of the art"

My Lexus LS is very dependable and amazing to drive in the snow

My BMW 750 I (M sport) X drive is a nightmare to maintain as this car needs 2 batteries, special run flat tires at $432 EACH and requires an oil change every 5,000 miles @$245

Lexus dealer charged me $100 and said 10,000 miles is ok ( I never go past 6,000)

The electronics on the BMW are very complex .

To change the cabin filter on the Lexus takes 2 minutes NO tools and my wife changed it and we bought OEM parts off Amazon under $10

The BMW the dealer wanted over $300 to remove the screws to gain access $40 for the filter

The BMW needed a shock absorber after hitting a pot hole $2,800 and it took 4 WEEKS to get the part

The Lexus 2011 Only needed the battery and tires replaced and parts are readily available over night if needed

When the BMW had the batteries replaced one under the hood the other in the trunk they had to be programed to the car

The Lexus battery took 10 minutes to replace

Twin turbo 93 Octane to get the right performance and this car cost over $20,000 more then the Lexus ($87,600) BMW $123,000 +

BMWENGINE.jpg
 

Cpeters

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Currently trying to fix my weilmclain aquabalance which is acting up. Was looking for a direct vent unit without all the complicated computer stuff like my weilmclain. No primary and secondary loop stuff. I was
even thinking of a small tank heater. The problem with these boilers is, the techs need to contact the manufacturer for help and you can tac a couple hundred onto the service call. Any ideas? I currently have
a tank power vent hwh, PS, glad I didn't get a combi.
I ended up putting in an AO Smith power vent HWH. 2 zones no primary and secondary zones. Temp to 150 not 180 like the boiler. I'll see how it goes. Wasted $300 on service techs that called the same Weil Mclain i did. Had to use power vent because I got rid of my chimney. Time will tell.
 

John Gayewski

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I ended up putting in an AO Smith power vent HWH. 2 zones no primary and secondary zones. Temp to 150 not 180 like the boiler. I'll see how it goes. Wasted $300 on service techs that called the same Weil Mclain i did. Had to use power vent because I got rid of my chimney. Time will tell.
I must have missed your wanting to put a wster heater in for a space heating application. That is not wise. I thought you were wanting to choose between a tankless heater and a standard cast iron boiler which cast iron is better in my opinion.

A water heater won't last near as long as a boiler could. They aren't made for three duty cycle like a boiler is. You'll probably chew through it in a few years.

Sorry I missed that part of the question. Good luck. You CAN get lucky and have a water heater work for you, but generally they are asked to do more than they're design in a space heating situation.
 

Dana

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Let me tell you about " state of the art"

My Lexus LS is very dependable and amazing to drive in the snow

My BMW 750 I (M sport) X drive is a nightmare to maintain as this car needs 2 batteries, special run flat tires at $432 EACH and requires an oil change every 5,000 miles @$245

Lexus dealer charged me $100 and said 10,000 miles is ok ( I never go past 6,000)

The electronics on the BMW are very complex .

To change the cabin filter on the Lexus takes 2 minutes NO tools and my wife changed it and we bought OEM parts off Amazon under $10

The BMW the dealer wanted over $300 to remove the screws to gain access $40 for the filter

The BMW needed a shock absorber after hitting a pot hole $2,800 and it took 4 WEEKS to get the part

The Lexus 2011 Only needed the battery and tires replaced and parts are readily available over night if needed

When the BMW had the batteries replaced one under the hood the other in the trunk they had to be programed to the car

The Lexus battery took 10 minutes to replace

Twin turbo 93 Octane to get the right performance and this car cost over $20,000 more then the Lexus ($87,600) BMW $123,000 +

Consider buying an electric vehicle (EV)- for most the maintenance is essentially reduced to tires & windshield wipers.

If you're into road trips, favor quick-charging speed over range. (The Mustang EV has reasonable max range, but the last 20% for topping it up is excruciating.)

In short years there will be ample competition from BYD, Xiaopeng, Nio and Great Wall (among others), all of which are way ahead of all US, European, Japanese, or Korean manufactures, with the exception of Tesla. VW group may have grown a leg to stand on against the tsunami of Chinese competition within the next few years, but nobody else does. Despite lots of pre-orders, the limited production runs of gold plated pickups & SUVs isn't going to be enough to save GM or Ford, though one of those two might survive. Ford doesn't have good enough credit to make the required investments at cheap enough bond rates- stay tuned. (They have big EV plans, but might not be able to finance them.) Toyota (ergo Lexus) seems to be betting their future on hybrids- a very bad bet indeed, IMHO, though they are going to be selling a battery EV in 2023 (?), that car is going to be built by BYD with BYD's technology. GM is part of a consortium with a hot selling EV in China (the Wuling Mini), but it's a car more targeted for the developing world, not the US market.

BYD's blade battery tech with (extremely fast to full 100% LFP battery chemistry) and 800V system will be very attractive for those running road trips. The newer "Ocean" series with that is only starting to roll out the first was the EA1 Dolphin (released only a couple of months ago), was a Toyota-Corolla sized car (but nicer than a Corolla) starting at only $15K USD. The more upscale "Seal" has been spotted on the street, but should be out there before the summer. Xiaopeng's P5 is a Camry-sized car (but much nicer than a Camry) in the mid $20Ks USD. Nio's offerings are even nicer- something of a luxury brand in China, competing remarkably well against Tesla in a similar luxury & technology class. All of these cars will be selling in Europe either this year or next.

Unless they partner with a better developed EV company BMW & Mercedes pretty much won't be able to compete. Volvo (now owned by Geely, one of the bigger Chinese car companies) might survive the transition to electric. Hyundai might make it too- this year's Kona EV is a compelling car with lots of consumer demand, but they're not making nearly enough to meet that demand. (Hyundai at least announced this week that they are shutting down their internal combustion engine design division and applying those resources to electric drive trains.) We'll see.

Yes, there will be lots of electronic tech in all of these, and there will be those with good support (like Tesla & BYD) or those with promises of free over the updates with no follow-through (like VW, until recently- they will have to turn that around, and seem to be trying), but the competitive market will kill off the laggards fairly quickly. The internal combustion engine is already dead for cars & light trucks 2030 will be way too late for legacy automotive companies to have fully made the transition. The plunging year on year cost of batteries (along with battery performance improvements) has already hit new-car cost parity (for a better, lower maintenance car), and going forward only the most ardent "vroom vroom" noise enthusiasts are likely to be buying new internal combustion cars (at any price point) after 2025. That seems shockingly quickly, but Chinese and Norwegian markets have shown doubling or tripling of market share in EVs, even when they were more expensive than internal combustion engine equivalents, and now that the costs/prices/margins have all improved on the EVs they can be sold at even more competitive prices. (Tesla has about a 30% gross margin, about 3x the margin of GM or Ford on their internal combustion cars. They're only that expensive because of the limited competition, and year+ backlog of orders on the Model 3 & Model Y.)
 

Sylvan

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I was looking at one electric car the 2022 Porsche Taycan Turbo
but I was thinking of waiting a year or so to see how it works after being in the real world as the mileage has a lot to be desired and the time to recharge is not that good

The BMW when I stopped driving it in sport mode and went to eco I increased my MPG considerably with little effect on 0 - 60

Also I wonder how long a battery charge will last in an electric car in the winter with the heater on. A replacement battery can cost a fortune as the BMW has TWO batteries because of all the high tech electronics
 

Dana

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I was looking at one electric car the 2022 Porsche Taycan Turbo
but I was thinking of waiting a year or so to see how it works after being in the real world as the mileage has a lot to be desired and the time to recharge is not that good

The BMW when I stopped driving it in sport mode and went to eco I increased my MPG considerably with little effect on 0 - 60

Also I wonder how long a battery charge will last in an electric car in the winter with the heater on. A replacement battery can cost a fortune as the BMW has TWO batteries because of all the high tech electronics

It depends on the car, but people in Scandanvia camp out in their Tesla Model 3s in sub-zero weather with plenty of charge left to get home. Not all current EVs use heat pumps for most do, but most WILL in short years. The range penalty of running the heater isn't huge with any Tesla, even in very cold weather. The range penalty of cold BATTERIES is more to the point with ternary batteries.

The expense of EV batteries is still falling (fast!)- it will only cost a fortune if you somehow destroy it in a way that voids the warranty. Ternary lithium ion chemistries have a major chunk of the market right now (due to their energy & power density advantage), but LFP (lithium iron phosphate), is both cheaper and safer. LFP batteries can also be charged more quickly, can be discharged to 0% and charged to 100% (which is damaging to most ternary batteries) without compromise, and run about twice as many cycles. Despite a ~20% energy density penalty, LFP has become the chemistry of choice for high cycle uses like busses & trucks, and is what's used in almost all Chinese Teslas, as well as all BYDs.

The range hit in sub-zero weather isn't nearly as bad with LFP compared to ternary batteries too, but there is reason to believe that CATL's sodium ion battery chemistry will do even better than LFP on cost, range, energy density, and cold weather performance once they get it in full production. There is still a lot of development going on in the battery space right now, and the year-on-year improvements in cost & performance continue to beat expectations.

BTW: I meant to say the Hyundai Ioniq 5, (not Kona) in the previous post, as the most compelling Korean EV. It's a nice car, but price & feature wise the higher end Chinese vendors still look disruptively competitive against any German product right now. VW group is likely to hang on, but BMW's "wait and see what the market does" attitude will likely sink them sooner than most people think. This is going to be a wake-up year in Germany (as if 2021 wasn't enough?) The Tesla Model 3 outsold all of their internal combustion & EV competitors in the same luxury level in Germany last year. In the same year one out of every five cars sold in German was a battery-only EV. This year BYD, Nio, and Xiaopeng (shortened to X-peng in western fonts, in order to fit the nameplate onto the trunk lid :) ) are planning big moves into the German market in 2022 to compete head to head against Tesla (where the Berlin factory is just now cranking up) and to establish a presence before VW develops to where they can become as cost-efficient as Tesla or the Chinese vendors. Seems VW has figured out there is a serious existential threat here, whereas BMW is still pretty much in "meh" mode.
 
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