Is this normal or way overkill? Boiler manifolds.

I was on a service call today and looked at their heating set up.

Sorry for the bad picture. All I had was my phone and it was dark.

One supply and return manifold. No mixing valves. I should have looked to see what the boiler was set at. They had HWB and radiant under joist and in concrete. I didnt see any boiler protection on the return side done either.

The lay out was organized. Seven zones and a pump for each one. They all had flow checks on the supply side. There were shut off valves on both supply and return side withe boiler drains about to drain from both ends.

This wasn't a P and S system. Only the manifolds that you see. So when one of the zones opened it would kick on the circ and push water through everything back to the boiler.

Not surprising =/

The power company loves these setups.

I have seen that (no mixing/no boiler protection) more than once on what should be dual temperature systems driven by iron boilers. Most of the time it seems like the installer may have been vaguely aware of the return water problem that can occur and compensated by installed a boiler 50% larger than it needed to be.

Overkill? I don't know........

WOW what a work of art. Looks very neat. What kind of boiler is that? What size is the pipe at the manifold?

The white thing is just a 1000 gal.storage / tempering tank. An old milk tank. The boiler is outside. When the photo was taken the boiler was a Pelco 1520. I now am running a Bio-burner.

The pipe is 4 inch stainless.