LOVE Cast Iron!

Some of you may remember a post I made a year ago when I brought 4 of these boat anchors home from the coast of Maine.

I sand blasted and primed these last fall and jugged them in the garage where they sat for the winter

Well this summer I had some paint mixed and I sprayed them on a calm day outside, I am very happy with the result. The WORST part was getting them upstairs, well two good friends and a couple of Tony's Pizzas and all 4 are up. This is the second to largest of the bunch (which are all relitivly small), we estimated this to weigh around 300 pounds, and they hold a suprising amount of water.

All of these are on the second floor as I have in-slab radiant on the first floor. They are piped reverse-return supplied by a single 3/4" zone valve from my home-made pri/sec hybrid setup. Each radiator is supplied by dedicated 1/2" copper branches. There is little flow to the radiators and it takes roughly 4 minutes for the return from this loop to heat up. This radiator CRANKS out the heat, the high mass and high water volume is incredible, as the dead men knew, CI radiators are very forgiving in water flow.

Comments, questions, sarcastic remarks welcome!

TS

maple1 said:

Any idea what kind of delta-T they're giving?

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Around 10F at an estimated 1.5 GPM

salecker said:

So i will probably end up with some for sale,or trade

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This is exactly how I acquired these, the guy had built a house and these were left over, along with 10+ HUGE fancy ones.

heaterman said:

Good call on the reverse return.
What static pressure did you need to get water moved up to the second floor and what did you use for air vents?

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My system is set for 1bar (15psi) static this radiator is only 7' top of boiler to top of rad.
I used DURST keyed nickel plated brass vents, for hopefully childproofness..........
The farthest radiator and the closest are around 25' apart, the return is not complete in the pica and just has a 3/4" skarkbite cap on it till I get more flooring down so I can install the other radiators (something about a horse and a cart in the correct order ya know )

ICEGUY4,
I painted them with Nason Automotive primer in a rattle can, and had the paint custom mixed at CARQUEST in rattle cans as well, very happy with the results.

TS

Interesting, I never thought of that........... If you don't mind how much was it to powder coat a radiator. After blasting them out in the yard there is plenty of roughness from the casting sand. All the years of lead paint coats hid that pretty well.

TS

Reverse return is for balancing the flows through several radiators connected to the same zone. You would not need it with CI baseboard, those are generally connected in series as your current fin-tube BB usually is piped.

I did some work last winter is a house that had CI BB, BaseRay I think was the brand, we sanded them with a DA primed and sprayed with and automotive HVLP gun, came out as smooth as a car ready for WAX!


TS