The floor in the farm house is old pine which we painted ....not tongue and groove just 4 inch old pine floors.  There is one exception ....the master bedroom (if you can call it that ...it is where we sleep) has for some reason just plywood sheeting and we have a carpet and pad over that.  It has been the most comfortable room in the house with the conventional air system ....but that may change with radiant floor heating.  Again the upstairs also has the painted pine flooring .....but I am not willing to tear out ceilings to put radiant in the floor there.  There are toe walls that I can get pex to to be able to put in radiators there.  And then the floor in the bathroom downstairs as well as a utility room across from it with an entry hallway in between will not allow radiant floor in them because the crawl space underneath is to shallow ...unless I find a very capable infant to do it.  We can fish pex to them to get radiators in them

My current plan is main hot water line coming from the boiler (non-pressurized OWB 155000 BTU) through heat exchanger with a radiant floor in concrete for an outbuilding that I am building of 350 square feet, with a pump, thermostat and relay on the other side of the heat exchanger for that floor.  Next in series it goes down the pex in insulated piep in the ground 75 feet to the house.  There it first goes through a heat exchanger for the radiant floor as well as the radiators in the house with a pump controlled by a thermostat and relay for the radiant floor and the radiators.  Thermostat would be downstairs.  There is a mix valve after the radiator run is t’d off of the line from the output of the heat exchanger.  After the main line goes through the heat exchanger for the radiant floor and radiators then it then goes to a water to air heat excanger in the plenum of the existing HVAC and this is controlled by another thermostat and relay that I will locate upstairs so it will come on if the upstairs gets too cold. Hopefully this will not happen and the forced air will never come on but I thought it necessary as a safety measure.  I am now wondering with what you have said abotu doing away with the heat exchanger in the forced air. 

The square footage for the farmhouse is just over 1300 with about 400 downstairs and 900 downstairs.  So the total square footage I am heating is around 1600-1700.

Hope this helps and I look forward to your response.  Thx again, RH

PM sent to NoLoMich ...Thx RH

Can a (TRV) like HeaterMan has spoken about be used on a baseboard heat application? Do you need to run a separate pipe past the appliance to keep water flow to different raidiators full volume even with one along the line cutting down??TELL ME MORE HEATER MAN

TacoSteelerMan - 06 July 2008 10:03 PM

Can a (TRV) like HeaterMan has spoken about be used on a baseboard heat application? Do you need to run a separate pipe past the appliance to keep water flow to different radiators full volume even with one along the line cutting down??TELL ME MORE HEATER MAN

In order of sequence.......... Yes. Yes.

As to the second question, what you do is install a “restrictor” of some type, usually a diverter tee that causes some of the flow to seek the path of less resistance and go through the desired baseboard. It would then T back into the main. The TRV would be located after the diverter and at the beginning of the BB.

There are a few variables that have to be contended with as far as overall head of the piping, reduction of temperature as you go down the line from BB to BB and GPM being adequate to carry the heating load.

I’ve never installed a piping setup like that but have had the occasion to work on quite a few. They were very popular in the days before zoning became the rage. They produced very even heat through out the house. There’s no reason a person couldn’t use zoning on a diverter tee system but the rational would have to be multiple zones with very large heat loads in each. Like + 40,000 btu. Anything less than that you can carry with 3/4 tubing if you watch the length of your baseboard as the fluid temperature drops