heating with hydronics

[Seeker]

Haven't posted anything in this folder for a little while...

I hope we can get some good science related discussions going !

Recently I found out about a form of heating your home known as 'hydronics'. Apparently it's been used sucessfully in Europe for many years. Basically it involves heating the rooms of your home by moving hot water, rather than by moving hot air. This seems to make sense to me, since water is considered to be a 'heat sink' and holds heat better than air does. (Water takes longer to heat up, and to cool down).

The guy I was speaking with, related how your home heating system can be coupled with your hot water tank, by drawing heat off the hot water tank, and then circulating it. Admittedly, using hydronics to heat most existing homes, would require time and money, as you would have to change over from heating ducts to special water pipes, in order to circulate the water. I'm curious to know what kind of cost would be involved in such a changeover. It seems to me that when new homes are being constructed, a hydronics heating system, might be worth considering.

Seeker

[citivolus]

Here in the northeast it's pretty common, it's a lot like heating with steam only less dangerous because it doesn't boil. One advantage is that you can do different things with it. The typical installation uses a radiant baseboard which sets up a natural convective current in the room. Another popular thing to do is to run tubing under the floor surface and just heat the floor and let that radiate into the room, it works well embedded in mortar under ceramic tile, very nice on cold winter mornings.

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swiftly flying

[Seeker]

Hi Citivolus,

That's interesting to hear that this type of heating technology is used where you live. You mentioned that sometimes tubing under the floors is used and sometimes a radiant baseboard is used. Could you please explain a bit more about exactly how the radiant baseboard is set up. Are there ways to use this type of heating which do not require extra tubing to be installed in order to circulate the hot water ?

On the web page below, there's a section called 'Hot water baseboard heating', which I'm guessing is similar to what you are describing.

http://advancedhydronics.com/technic...oard%20Heating

Another section on the Advanced Hydronics web page talks about geothermal heating :
http://advancedhydronics.com/geoexchange.htm

I hadn't realized that geothermal heating was used for residental applications, but this page states that hundreds of thousands of homes in the U.S. are using this type of heating. I like the statement about heating costs being 65% lower with this type of heating, especially since I live in northern Canada, where it 'kinda chilly' for much of the year..lol !

The web page seems to be implying that this type of geothermal heating pays for itself in 8 to 14 years. I'm guessing that this would be a shorter period of time, in areas such as where I live. Here, deregulation of power has taken place, and as a result, energy costs have shot up in recent years.

Seeker

[Seeker]

p.s. I thought it was neat to learn that Albert Einstein used geo-exchange technology to heat his home in the 1920's !

Seeker

[citivolus]

Yes the hot water baseboard heating is exactly what I use for heat. It is heated by an oil fired furnace and controlled by a simple thermostatic relay, but it could also be heated by a gas furnace or geothermally.
The dominant cost of geothermal systems is the electricity to run the heat pump. The heat pump is much better than straight electric heat in that it can put ten times the heat into a room for the same power draw. Heat pumps are versatile devices and are used as refrigerators, air conditioners and stirling engines. Just to give you a rough idea for your costs, if you can estimate what it would cost to heat your place with electricity a geothermal/geo-exchange unit would cost roughly one fifth to a quarter of that depending on the pumps maintainence costs. Don't forget that it also acts as an air conditioner when it's hot.

Oh, Dean Kamen also uses geothermal heating and cooling in his house.

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swiftly flying