One of the hottest topics included in the line-up of 58 workshops at ISH North America 2004 was hydronic heat. Although hydronic or radiant heat is not common in most of the United States, it is growing in popularity. Rich Trethewey, perhaps the nation's most famous plumber, thanks to his many appearances on PBS, was the featured speaker at one of the workshops.
Here are some of the highlights of his presentation about the flexibility and other advantages of hydronic heat:
People will buy their dream house and never even think about how the building is heated or cooled. They'll know that there's something on the wall that's connected to something in the basement that sends them a bill, but they don't really know what it is. And so they'll move in and never have the chance to know whether they're going to be comfortable.
Hydronics is for the people who say, "I'm sick of this (heat) being on and off. I'm sick of the dry nose. I just want to be comfortable. I want to walk on a warm floor. I want to take a towel off of a warm towel rack."
With hydronics, you use water as the conveyance medium to move heat through the building. You could have a hydro air unit, which is an air handler with the equivalent of an automobile radiator in the air stream. Heated water goes through the coil. Air blows across it. All those air handlers come down to a central place where there's one boiler.
Right now boilers can be changed to oil or to gas, and everything's fine. If fuel prices start to go up, I can look at new alternative sources, because I have hot water distributing energy through the building. I could look at geothermal — getting heat out of the ground and bringing it into that water. I could have solar. I could have all sorts of choices as alternatives to provide energy (for the system). If I'm stick with six or seven hot air furnaces, I'm toast. I have to just take whatever (fuel source) I'm stuck with.
The key with hydronics is that you can have the boiler as the root of the tree and take that water and load-manage it to do every function you can imagine in the building. So I can take that water and I can go over to an indirect tank — a super-insulated thermos bottle filled with water ready to go for the faucets or the bathtub. Immersed in that thermos bottle is a coil filled with boiler water. When that tank says, "I need some water heated," it brings the boiler on and heats up the tank. Then when it's done, it shuts off and goes back to room temperature. It isn't like a tank-type water heater that goes on and off, on and off, being wasteful.
If I have a pool out back, instead of having a separate pool heater, I could use the boiler, which I don't need in the summer, to put boiler water on one side of the heat exchanger and pool water on the other to heat the pool. I could heat the spa. I could go out and melt a little sidewalk snow. You could take that one device and load manage it through the building. And you've got the flexibility to change fuel in the future.
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