The installer is tasked with setting up a three-zone radiant floor heating system using a 5-ton geothermal heat pump and a mod/con boiler, connected through a primary-secondary system with closely spaced tees. The system includes 4 earth loops of 1” HDPE tubing, each 500 feet long, supplying the heat pump, and features underfloor tubing with aluminum plates.

A hydronics newbie decides that he can eliminate the temperature drop effect by putting all three supply-side tees upstream of all three return-side tees. If you don’t think it will work, what would you do to change it?

An installer inspects a system where an aging steam boiler supplies several cast-iron radiators. He proposes to convert the system from steam to hot water and replace the old boiler with a mod/con boiler. Can you spot some potential problems and suggest some improvements?

An installer is asked to replace two aging cast-iron boilers with two mod/con boilers, but reuse as much of the existing distribution system as possible. Can you spot several details, omissions or other quirks that will lead to problems over the life of this system?

Can you diagnose why this glitch is happening, and suggest alternate methods for constructing this portion of the system?

Because the price of fuel oil has increased dramatically over the last several months, an installer with lots of experience in installing conventional oil-fired boilers is asked to install a pellet-fired boiler.

I recently reviewed a project in which a municipal building was being connected to a district heating system supplied by pellet-fueled boilers.

Figure 1 shows a piping layout that was used to retrofit a pellet-fired boiler to an existing 4-zone heating system supplied by an oil-fired boiler.

These webinars are free to attend, and aimed at designer and engineers.

Because they generate heat intermittently, renewable energy heat sources such as solar thermal collectors and pellet boilers require thermal storage tanks. So do storage-based systems using off-peak electricity, or micro combined heat and power (MCHP) generation.