Living with Hydronic heating. My first winter.

[HoosierBuddy]

Hey guys,

Just a note to those of you that have considered hydronic heating. We're half-way through the winter and if I had to use one word to describe my hydronic experince it would be "Fantastic".

I went with a Trinity Ti150 sourced from DescoEnergy.com. It heats the 35' X 27' X 13' garage as one zone, the 600 sf family room upstairs as another zone, and the breezeway area that ties the garage to the house as a third zone. I did have a few small issues getting the Ti150 dialed in. It is a 92.7% efficient tankless boiler that will modulate between 20k and 150k BTU depending upon the heat requirements.

I've left the garage set at 60-degrees. The boiler can handle that without even trying hard. The heat is even. There's no noise to speak of. No air blowing around, and best of all (perhaps) since there's no positive pressure, you don't lose the heat when the overhead doors open...at least you don't lose it very rapidly.

The garage is just so comfortable to work in, I can't really express how pleased I am with the heat. If you were just going to use the garage to park cars in, you probably couldn't justify the hydronic expense, but if you are going to spend several hours a week out there working, it's worth every penny.

Speaking of pennies...it seems to have added about $100/month to my gas bill. That's for the garage, the family room above, and the breezeway. The living spaces are set to 72, and those zones run a lot more than the garage itself.

Phil

 

[hitek]

awesome...it is interesting to hear your experience. I thought they would be a great system to use in a garage.

 

[Kapt]

Good to hear your positive reviews. I'm still in the process of designing my system, and every now and then I consider bagging the idea, but commentary like yours helps.

 

[G M]

My first winter too, its been working good so far until today, it is running about 3 degrees behind having trouble keeping up with the -36F this morning.

 

[PAToyota]

I second the point about not losing heat as quickly when you open a door - something people don't always think about. If you're heating the air, the walls and floor slowly soak up some of that heat, but all the hot air is lost when the door is opened. When you're heating the slab there is a big thermal mass that that quickly heats the air up again after the door is shut. Looks like a nice place you have there!

 

[Kent in KC]

You might wanna think about getting some serious protection around that plumbing. Wouldn't want to smash anything. Looks good.

 

[useless]

Here's mine, but I only heat the garage. I wish I'd have known about this type of heat in '87 when we built the house. There are 3 zones. The center of the shop has one run of tubing, 400' I believe. The two outside areas have twice that amount of tubing and can be controlled but flow valves to temper the amount of heat in each section. I do have some issues with the water heater and its capabilities. It can't catch up as fast as I would like it too. Might need to explore a small boiler to see if that would help.