How Not to Heat Your House With a Super Expensive Radiant Heating System

So, we've got this super spiffy radiant heating system in the house that we blogged a ton about..mostly me bitching about how looooooong it took to do the staple up part. Its worked fine so far but with it dipping down into the high 30's at night I'd wake up at 6:30am and...the house would be cold! Like 64 deg F in the front part of the house when the thermostats were set to 72....not good as this front part of the house is where the babies hang during the nanny share....

I called the guys that designed the system and was like WTF? We went thru all the settings to make sure I had them set right and a couple of the loops were not flowing as much as they should of been...fixed that but the next morning the front room-bath-kitchen was cold!

Back again I go to the phone and the nice guys at NRT said basically, DUH! you're only running 1/3 of the system that's designed to be run as a whole so no wonder it can't keep up. But I said ya but its a nice and toasty 68 in the basement and the slab loops arent even on! They said, 'Double Duh, you're heating the basement with the same loops that youre trying to heat the main part of the house with!'

See, here's what the staple up looks like. The wood floor has an R value of ~1 but hey that open air below the plates has an R value of... 0! So which way was the heat going to flow? Yep that's right down into the basement and not up into the house...

When it was 64 deg upstairs it was actually warmer downstairs in the 'unheated' garage! I jacked up the heating parameters to the highest safest points. We had 140 deg water flowing in the loops and it was better but the rooms were still cold in the early mornings and the floors were not evenly warm. In the hallway, front room, bathroom, and baby's room the floors never really felt warm. With 140 deg water all the floors shoulda felt toasty.

To the plans we went and discovered that they called for these under-floor plates to be insulated to R-19.

Off to Home Despot I went hoping to find encapsulated R-19 batts. No joy, they don't even stock kraft-faced batts? So, I went on down the road to the local 'real' lumber yard Economy Lumber. They also do not stock encapsulated batts. The counter guy there said it was a 'special order' only item? But they did stock formaldehyde free kraft faced batts and I bought as many as I could fit into the PT Cruiser which was really three but I made a fourth fit. Thank granny goodness that they are seriously compressed by that shrink wrap. Its fun to slice em open and they all pop out and expand like crazy.

Now, when working with non-encapsulated batts ya gots to cover up and wear a real particle filter and eye protection. The itty-bitty glass fibers will get everywhere and into your skin and then itch like crazy. I did pretty good with the itching, I think the kraft facing helped with that...I probably should of been wearing pants though as my legs felt a little itchy afterwards.

We started stuffing the batts in the joist bays. This was bringing back all those horrible memories of working overhead for hours on end grinding nails...ugh.

It didn't actually take all that long to do. You just gots to be careful to not compress the batts too much. To get an actual R-19 outta them they have to be installed magically correct...so I'm hoping to get like R-12 with my instal. I'm glad I didn't need to use those insulation holder metal rod thingys. The batts are sticking fine in the bays. This shows that we've insulated the bathroom and the hallway.

And here's an exicting picture of more insulation. This shows that we've completely insulated the front room.

This is the little bit in the nursery and edge of the kitchen. We should of done the two sides but they were like half size and we would of had to cut a batt in half lengthwise to fit...that sounded like a huge PITA so we decided to put it off till the next go round. The 4 bags we were able to fit in the car was not enough to do the entire floor so we just did the areas that felt colder than the others. When we were insulating this area we discovered a serious kink in the tubing. I ran over to the flow meter but the loop was flowing the correct amount? I must of dialed up the flow to compensate for the kink when I was adjusting flows earlier.

Success!! Here's the temps in the kitchen and outside. It wasnt super cold when we took this but you get the idea.

Here's the temp in the 'unheated' basement after the partial insulation job. This is pretty good as its 52 outside and 64 inside. Point being, its a lot closer to the outside temp than it used to be. I've checked it when its in the 40's outside and its in the highe 50's in the basement.

More importantly this is the temp in the front part of the house when it was in the low 40's outside! In the morning now this room is 70 instead of 64 which is much, much better but still not correct as we have it set for 72.

Whats been super great is that in all the areas that are insulated the floor is super toasty warm feeling. When we sit on our butts in the baby room its nice and toasty. Same with the hallway and the bathroom where the floors were always colder. We'll have to buy another 4 bags of insul at least to finish the job but I'm trying to put that off as in the areas left to do we need to run plumbing and wiring and we don't want to have to yank it all down or wrestle with it when we're doing that.

This has nothing to do with the insulation. We just wanted to show a picture of the fabulous shop lights we just put in. These are plug-ins with pull cords. Holy-moly these are a million times better than those stupid halogen work lights we were using. Look how evenly bright it is! We can't believe we didn't do this months ago!

We Have Heat!!!!! Ya-Hoooooooooooo

We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!We Have Heat!!!! We Have Heat!!!!

Can you tell that we are a little bit excited? Its only, oh, 6 months late but we got the radiant heating system up and running a couple of days ago and maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan is it nice to have heat...We've lived in this drafty, under-insulated, leaky window'd Victorian for two winters now and wow the difference is just amazing. When it's in the mid 30s and all you have is a couple of 1500Watt space heaters to keep warm...wow that's just not very fun. We could really only keep the bathroom, our bedroom and the family room warmish - when it was cold only the tiny bathroom would get actually warm. Gone are the days of it being 45 degrees in the kitchen.

Let's talk for a minute about radiant heating and its super awesomeness. There are no floor registers to take up space. There are no ugly duct lines running everywhere. There are no drafts. The floor is 'warm'. Now, this is a low temp water system where the water never gets above 110 deg F so the floors aren't 'hot' but they are warm. It's hard to explain but I'll try. In the past when we've walked on the floors in our socks they were COLD. The cold would just emanate from them and chill you through your feet. Now, the floors are warm and they warm you through your feet. It's an even warm which is also super amazing. Every room is evenly warm - there are no hot spots, no cold spots its just evenly warm and soooooooooooooo nice. We have to admit we are fricken in love with this heating system.

Have to give props to the guys at North East Radiant Technology - it appears that they've designed a system that is working at advertised.

Now, as to the question of whether or not it was worth the amazing amounts of hassle and the extra expense compared to a forced air furnace......the jury's still out on that one. But it is super nice to be able to take your preemie baby into any part of the house and not have to worry if it's too cold for her. That right there might be priceless.

So, I tried filling the system after the pressure test without following any sort of directions...It did not go super well. I plumbed the fill valve into the hot water line from our tankless heater instead of the cold water supply line...I got a ton of air trapped in the system and it didn't work...after a looooong call to my radiant designer it was determined that I had everything hooked up right but that all that trapped air was tripping the pressure head bypass (that black cylinder next to my right hand). I was going to have to bleed the thing the right way to get it to work.

Here's me going at it the right way using the hose and bleeding each individual loop separately.. Ya there was a ton of air still in the lines and I went through like geez a couple hundred gallons of water.

Notice all the water on the floor and my wet shoes...one of those almost full 55 gallon trash cans tipped over part way and got a lot of water everywhere.

After I got the system bled I found out I had to set a couple of secret parameters on the boiler and Tekmar control systems so that they would talk to each other...wasted a cold wet tired evening of banging my head against the wall on that one...but I got it figured out and now the boiler and fancy-pants controls are talking like old friends.

These little dealys are the flow meters and flow control valves for each loop. This is before I adjusted them all so some have no flow. You adjust them by putting that red cap on top and twisting them to either decrease or increase flow. The amazing thing about this is that the flow thru the loops is mostly set at .2-.6 GPM? Man that's nothing it seems like?

Here is the control panel for the boiler. This is where I had to set the secret parameter. Right now its showing that the boiler is in stand-by mode and the water circulating thru it is at 98 deg F. The hard to read dial on the right is the pressure in the system which is reading slightly more than 10psi. It should probably be at 12psi so I might have to add some more water to the system. What's amazing is how quiet this thing is..at full blast you hardly hear anything from it.

Here is the super-fabulous TekMar 420 boiler control thingy. The control panel says that the boiler is firing, the circulator pump is running, that the boiler is modulated down to 18% and that only one zone is requesting heat.

Here is what the valves look like when they are open. The top pops and you see the thick blue line. This shows that loops 5&6 are circulating which corresponds to the zone shown on the controller above. This is the kitchen-sun room zone.

These two temperature dials show the outgoing water temp (to the loops) and the incoming water temp (from all the loops). It shows that there is a temp difference of ~20 deg which is right.

Here's the cool co-axial exhaust of the boiler. Even at full blast it's way quieter than the tankless water heater. It makes a low-quiet moaning sound that I hope my neighbors can't hear. Though it does sorta make the area sound haunted.

Don't worry that wood above is just temporary. We threw that up to block the breeze from whipping through there and up through the floorboards.

One thing that's a little wacky is that we can not insulate the thin-fins yet. Since this is radiant heat the heat radiates evenly in all directions. The AL plates help the heat to radiate upward more but still there is a lot of heat coming down. Last night with no heat on on the bottom floor it was a toasty 67 deg down there. Not ideal but hey it was 71 deg upstairs!

And for a final picture here is a wonderful shot of what the temp is in the front part of the house. Yep 70 deg!!!

These thermostats are great cause at the press of a button they also tell you what the outside temp is. Well at least I think thats great. So you can go, look its 45 deg outside and a nice even toasty 70 deg inside.

It truly is a great thing having lived without heat for so long to have this. Used to be we would know exactly how cold it was outside just by standing in our hallway. Now we open the front door and are shocked, shocked I tell you, at how cold it is. In fact I think that after the loooooong cold wet evening of getting the system up and running I might of shed a small tear as I opened the front door for the first time and it was WARM!

YAY WARM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyone who wants is welcome to come over and walk around in their socks to experience the super-wonderfulness of radiant heat. Just make sure it's a day that's actually cold outside and that we'll you know, be home...

odds n ends as we get closer to heat

We really are getting down to the last little bit of work for the heat.. just finishing up running gas line to all reaches of the house.

Here's Dan with his favorite harbor fright toy - the right angle drill - drilling holes in the studs to run the gas out to backyard. That's right, natural gas bbq here we come! That bbq has been our oven for the last couple years, so I'll be very happy to not need to get propane.. well, we'll still need it for our stove, but one thing at a time..

Ok, two things at a time :D
There were a couple repairs to make to the fire pit, like plumbing it into the gas line! More on this later..

This is where the laundry room will be, and then the line splits off to the backyard on the left.
No leaks here!

Pressurizing the system indicated that it was still leaking from somewhere though..

.. and lo and behold, the last place I would've thought to look, the line PG&E installed between the gas meter and the emergency shutoff valve! Look at that leak!!

We disassembled that whole section and taped and gooped it up, and the pressure holds! Unfortunately, there's still a slow leak somewhere at the manifold, so there's a bit more sleuthing to do before we can have the system inspected

A couple small leaks have been eliminated, but it still loses about a quarter pound of pressure an hour.. every connection has been checked and rechecked, and Dan even found and fixed a leak in one of the cast valves! Still a slow leak though..

There's a bit of wiring to do too. The control panel needs to be connected to the sensors and the boiler..

The boiler seems so small, it's extra crazy how much open space there is inside. Lots of coils up inside those cylinders though, which explains why it could look this empty and still be so heavy!

Couple circuits had to be run too. This one is for the tankless hot water heater.

Here's the other end of that circuit, approaching the heater.

A very exciting prospect of the brand-spanking new subpanels in the house is that as a line gets run, we can note it. Which means that we have an excellent chance of having all the circuit breakers accurately marked with the actual location the circuit is run!! Isn't that exciting?! (that sounds sort of sarcastic, which is completely unintended.. it's really an exciting prospect!)

manifold destiny

I mean, manifest density.. I mean, oh never mind

Because we changed the model of the boiler we're using, there was some retrofitting to do. We stepped down from the 110,000 btu model to the 60,000 btu model which does not have its own circulator pump, so here's Dan soldering in the new pump.

Once each of the valves was soldered on, Dan connected the stainless steel flex lines for the boiler inlet and outlet.

And then the boiler magically appeared on the wall, with no heavy lifting involved from the man with the bad back or the pregnant woman. Dan still had to hook it up though.. it's not all magic wands and whatnot.

<-- Notice here there are no pex lines connected to any of this

Next up was mounting the manifolds back to the wall, on top of the nice new fire-resistant drywall. We had to cut the pex to the correct length and remake all the connections. They've been pressurized up to 80psi for a week and no leaks!

Finally, we need to hook the control board up to the manifolds and pressurize the entire system.

For the boiler, we still need to install the vent, the condensate drip line, and the pressure-relief line. And we need to run the gas lines.

And then someday soon, there will be heat.

of thermostats and tree limbs

Dan spent this weekend working on last bits for the heating system. Here he is getting the temperature sensors ready to install. There are 3 zones upstairs, and they each get a sensor and a thermostat.

And each of these has about a dozen wires.. ok, it just seemed like a dozen.

Here he's pulling wires for the sensors and thermostats. This batch is heading up to the kitchen.

This will be the thermostat in the hallway.. once there's heat to control and, you know.. a hallway

Here he's installing the thermostat in the bedroom after feeding the wires up through the floor.

So we're covered for thermostats, next up is a boiler to get something hot flowing through all these tubes.

Meanwhile, I was out back taking care of a little problem with the tent we still have things stored in in the backyard. The point of the tent is to keep the random stacks of wood and metal dry, which works a little better when there's not a tree growing through the roof. We cut these limbs back before we setup the tent, but the tree must be healthier than it looks because in a year and a half the limbs have grown about 4 feet!

I cut this all back and patched the holes, so hopefully it'll do the trick. We'll find out soon, because the rain is headed in

I meant to take more pictures, but that turned out to be a little difficult holding a sawzall up on the "this is not a step" step of a ladder, so picture a lovely patch of gaffers tape and plastic that I'm picturing lasting through many a rainstorm.

happy long weekend

Turns out I was a little optimistic about being done putting up the thin fins.. there were more to put up under the kitchen. Dan put those up on Friday while I pounded in my head.. I mean, pounded in the tubing under the bedroom.

In answer to the question "what happens if you get a hole in the line, or need to add more tubing," here's a little illustration of the fix for the run under the front room that was a miserable 5' too short!

It's exactly like the fittings for copper tubing which I have some experience with..

With the tubing cut square (any angle or jaggedness to the cut makes it really hard to get a good seal), there is a piece of the fitting which slides into the tubing and nut that tightens down over that, with a compression sleeve in between

<-- Here's what it looks like with all the pieces on the tubing, ready to be tightened down

<-- And here's the finished splice. It was frustratingly close to being long enough.. this is only a few feet from the manifold!

<-- Here's Dan shooting a laser line to get the placement for the control panel

<-- And here he's checking to make sure it's level before (and during) bolting it to the wall. Doesn't it look cool?! We'll take the crate sides off so it will just be the flat backboard on the wall with everything attached to that, but they made it a lot easier to set it at the right height. I think it was Ian's idea to set the whole thing on floor jacks - asking a friend who stopped by to help again to hold up a giant heavy awkward thing can lead to the best ideas! ;)

Thank goodness for long weekends of thanksgiving, which gave us enough time to get the rest of the thin fins up (for real this time), all the rest of the tubing pounded in, the control panel up, and the tubing all connected to the manifold (and marked, because my Dan is a smart lad). And the last thing Sunday night was a leak test with the best, most high-tech tool ever: soapy water. All the little leaks were fixed with a little tightening, but you can see the last leak on the right there, just below the pressure gauge where all the bubbles are. The stinking filler valve is broken!

Everything else looks good though, even the splice I put in is holding pressure.. so we just need to replace the filler valve on the manifold, and this phase will be done. Next up, putting temperature sensors all over the place..

the fun continues

I can't really get these posts done on Sunday night anymore because I'm too cranky and sore and tired.. So let's see if a couple of days gives me more perspective and takes the whine factor down a notch or two..

<-- Dan and his new toy are cutting through the joists like butter. The holes can't be bigger than a third of the depth of the joist, and can't be any closer than 2" from the edges of the board, but it's a scary number of holes that need to be drilled to get the tubing everywhere it needs to be and then back to the manifold. It's a bit of an obstacle course of existing cuts and pipes and whatnot to find a clear path for the tubing. Any jogs make it much harder to pull the tubing through, but the most important thing is keeping the structural integrity of the joists that are, you know.. holding up the house.

<-- This is Ian. Ian came by to help on Saturday! Ian had loads of fun helping me pull the tubing through one of the runs. I tried to take better explanatory pictures of the process, but that's pretty hard to do when you're up in the joists trying not to kink the tubing or whack your head..

Basically, it needs to one single run of tubing that starts at the manifold carrying hot water out down and up each of the joist bays in the loop, and then back to the manifold. It's an easy enough concept, but the tubing is pretty stiff and if you try to bend it too much (or if it gets caught behind a giant beam while being pulled through a tangle of coils) it can kink. Which is bad, because even after unkinking it, it's not as smooth as it started out, and could impede the flow of water.

What we learned the first day was that pulling the tubing all the way through all the joists and back before pulling loops down into the joists made it really hard to start the loops without kinking the tubing. So the new-and-improved process goes like this:

1 - Pull the straight run of tubing all the way through all the joists in the run

2 - Pull out a loop in the very last joist bay in the run, then feed the tubing back into the next to last bay


3 - Pull a little loop out in each bay, working the tubing through from the big loop in that last bay, through each of the others until you wind up back at the manifold. As needed, pull more tubing through the straight run to the big loop at the end, because this is what gets fed through into each of the other bays

4 - When you get to the first bay in the run, run the tubing all the way down to the end, trying to keep it up in the bay (instead of dangling down towards the floor). This makes it gauging the length for each bay more accurate (because there's no estimating), and also makes it easier and faster when it's time to come back and whack the tubing into the channels.

5 - After the first bay has as much tubing as it needs, you can work back towards the last bay (where the big loop of tubing is getting pulled from), filling each bay with a full loop until you're back at that last bay.

6 - Whacking the the tubing into the channels starts at the first bay too, because the tubing going from there to the manifold is a cut end, that can't be made longer or shorter. Any excess can be pushed into the next bay as you go, or you can pull a little more from the next one if you're a little short.

7 - When you get to the last bay there's plenty of adjusting to do, either pulling a bit more through the straight run from the main roll of tubing, or pushing any extra back through.

Or.. in this case.. trying to make what seemed it like it might (hopefully) be enough tubing last.. until it became obvious that we were about 5 feet short

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.. Dan was tackling the last bit of thin fins to be put up under the kitchen

By the end of the weekend, we finished running all the tubing under the front part of the house

<-- This is the loop under the front room

<-- and this is the next loop over, which covers the entryway and the hallway, and the beginning of the bathroom loop (you can see the loops of tubing at the ends of the runs get a bit jumbled.. that's because there's more than one loop going through that spot)

Doesn't Dan look happy to be done with the weekend's labor?! Sundays definitely go a little slower than Saturdays.. but we've got a long weekend next weekend and we hope to get the rest of this phase finished.