Still alive... busy prepping for winter and being undermined by a longwall coal mine in October. :/
This brings me to a heating question for anyone with insight to radiant heat systems. For many years I've heated my shop with a simple Takagi THWH and in-floor radiant hot water heat. It's worked flawlessly minus a fan failure in the Takagi. The basic system is as such (not all the valves and whatnot diagrammed etc.):
Now for the bad news... I'm loosing my free natural gas (from a well on the property) due to the longwall coal mine. They buy out the wells and plug them at the level of the coal seam so they can mine through them etc. I can talk all about that at some point if anyone is interested... but basically I have to switch to other heating sources for my house, garage (what this thread is about), and my shop - which this is a question for. I plan to switch out my NG Takagi for a LP version and add an outdoor wood boiler as primary heat source. The LP THWH is relatively cheap and the Hardy 120k btu OWB was given to me. What I want to have happen is the LP THWH serve as backup for when I'm away for days and unable to feed the wood boiler. I quickly threw the following together (obviously without valves and many details shown) as a method to incorporate the two heat sources for my shop.
My thoughts were to have a thermostat control the pump in the radiant floor system to circulate the water through a... say 50 plate heat exchanger as well as activate the wood boiler when it drops below 65 degF. Then if the shop temperature fell to say 50 degF (which may indicate the wood boiler is no longer producing heat) a second thermostat would open the two NC valves and close the NO valve allowing the LP THWH to provide heat to the floor radiant loops.
I know there is probably a lot missing from my quick diagrams and many questions someone gifted in HVAC would ask - but am I anywhere close to a simple integration of these two heat sources?
Thanks,
Josh