ADVANTAGES OF HYDRONIC HEATING TO THE ARCHITECT OR ENGINEER
There are several ways that the architect or engineer can use Hydronic Heating to design added value into a home. Each of these advantages is significant on its own, but taken together, they add up to home heating comfort that is otherwise unattainable. Let’s look at them one at a time.
Heat Load Balancing
Every room in a house has a different amount of heat loss, depending on such factors as the number of exterior walls, windows, and entryways. This is especially sensitive for rooms with large windows providing a great deal of solar gain. The design challenge is to balance the heat load consistently throughout the house without busting the budget in construction and installation costs. Proper sizing of the amount of baseboard, radiator, or radiant heating that is in a room is an important way to control how much heat gets to the room.
A portion of the thermal envelope of a house (shown shaded).
Reprinted with permission from Modern Hydronic Heating for Residential and Light Commercial Buildings, 2E, Copyright Delmar Publishers.
Flexibility in Layout
A key advantage of Hydronic Heating is its expandability. You’re not inflexibly locked in to the original heating setup of the home. Whenever an addition is needed for a house, just add piping out to the extension, fit the new space with radiators, baseboards, or radiant heating, and you have plentiful Hydronic Heating comfort.
System Efficiency
Hydronic Heating uses hot water to deliver warmth to the home. That means you don’t suddenly lose heating when the boiler cycles off. Plenty of usable heat is still retained in the hot water in the system. It’s a low-cost heat boost that tremendously increases home comfort. In addition, Hydronic systems are sealed, so there is minimal heat loss as hot water is circulated through the home.
Climate Dependent Operation
By installing an outdoor reset control in the Hydronic system, it is easy to provide automatic heating comfort for the home, no matter what the temperature is outside. The reset control keeps the temperature inside the house stable by making small, continual changes to the water temperature being supplied to the Hydronic distribution units. As it gets colder outside, the reset control causes the hot water being distributed to rise, and the control reduces the water temperature when it gets warmer outside. The result is not only excellent heating comfort but reduced energy consumption because the hot water is continuously sent to the home at just the right temperature.
“Green” Heating
Today, the “greenness” of a house is increasingly a major factor in the homeowner’s satisfaction with it. Hydronic Heating is imperceptible, environmentally-clean, and provides heat that is distributed gently, gradually, and quietly to the room.