ANOTHER new guy with great expectations...

[EmannVB]

OK, so I've been reading here for a while, and have read so much, I feel as if I know less than when I started!

So, straight to the issues: I'm a retiring Naval Aviator, moving to a relatively remote 53 acres in southern WV. I have multiple chain saws, John Deere TLB with grapple, forks and bucket, Timber King B20 saw mill- so plenty of gear to make trees into usable things. I've built a 32X48 barn, with an apartment in it, 'cause my wife and kids weren't onboard with living in a tent. Needless to say, I will need to keep a steady pace on the new house, or I will end up a lonely man in barn! So the house I'm designing is a simple 1900sq' 1.5 story on a pre-existing basement. I'm certain I want radiant heat, an indoor gasification boiler (BioMass NextGen25 of BM 40), a 1000 gallon thermal storage tank, and a hot water heater that is heated from the thermal tank. What I need, is for someone who's already pulled the trigger on a project like this to tell me what the pitfalls are, and what I need to consider.

Hopefully my caveman-esque diagram comes through, and will provide a glimps of what I envision.

Thanks!
Mark

 

[Nofossil]

Welcome to the forum. An actual diagram on a first post - might be a forum first.

If response is important, you might want to provide a way to heat the zones directly rather than having to first heat storage. There are some elegant solutions for this - check the primary/secondary and simplest pressurized storage stickies at the top of this forum.

 

[sgschwend]

Pitfalls? There are no pitfalls. Install a ramp to the basement so you can roll down two 500 gallon pressurized storage tanks, paint them red to match the TK.


It looks to me that there is something wrong with the DHW. I guess what I see is that the circulator is running full time in the reservoir/manifold loop and there are two redundant heat exchanger in the storage tank.

With that setup you must be planing on not using water in the boiler?

The zone valves must not be shown.

If you are going to have a heat exchanger in the storage tank then you can use a regular hot water heater and a small circulator pump, that way the dhw will operate with its own controller. Might also be handy not to need a special order tank.

 

[EmannVB]

Pitfalls? There are no pitfalls. Install a ramp to the basement so you can roll down two 500 gallon pressurized storage tanks, paint them red to match the TK.


It looks to me that there is something wrong with the DHW. I guess what I see is that the circulator is running full time in the reservoir/manifold loop and there are two redundant heat exchanger in the storage tank.

With that setup you must be planing on not using water in the boiler?

The zone valves must not be shown.

If you are going to have a heat exchanger in the storage tank then you can use a regular hot water heater and a small circulator pump, that way the dhw will operate with its own controller. Might also be handy not to need a special order tank.

Thanks for the reply! I guess what I'm trying to accomplish, is DHW heated by the boiler, via the mass storage. I'm thinking of heat exchangers because of the closed loop design. I envision the operation woking in this manner: The boiler would heat the water in the big tank in one closed loop system, that hot water will then be used in the second closed loop to supply heat to the radiant system, as well as to some manner of domestic hot water. With the DHW, I was thinking of the tank with two HX's so I could heat the incoming water. Int he winter, when it's running, I would need minimal heating at the point-of-use. In the summer, I would need to use the point-of-use heaters as the sole method of heating DHW.

 

[dogwood]

Mark, have you looked at the BioHeat USA site's plumbing schematics? They have lots of them for many different applications which may help you visualize the things Steve mentioned, as well as cover many other details you might not have considered. I learned a lot from studying those schematics.

We live not too far from the WV border in Western Virginia ourselves. Good luck on your project.

Mike

 

[Gooserider]

I'm not seeing any returns from what I'm assuming are the house heat loops at the top of the picture - got to get that water back to the tank, or the wife is going to be out at the end with a mop and an attitude... :lol:

I would also redo that hookup to the DHW - put a dedicated coil in the main storage tank, and run your cold makeup water through it into the DHW tank, and also circulate back through that coil as needed to keep the DHW tank hot - Take a look at Nofossil's website in his sig a couple posts up, and see how he does his hot water - it is one of the slickest setups I've seen...

Gooserider