I found this very interesting and bring it up because I saw a comment about someone building a new log home in another thread.....
I spoke with both of these people this week making my rounds and checking with customers to see how they did this winter.
Both buildings are heated with a radiant floor system and fired with identical Windhager pellet boilers.
Building 1: 80x80 pole barn construction, 6,400sq ft, new in 2008, 7-1/2" walls blown cellulose with 1/2 Tuff-R on the exterior, 16" cellulose in ceiling. 3" of foam under entire 6" slab with radiant floor heat. 3,200 sq ft of building has 16' ceilings, 3,200 sq ft with 9' ceilings. There are 12x14 overhead doors on the east and west walls of the tall part and 4 9x8 overhead door on the low part. 12 3x3 windows plus 4 standard sized entry doors. Entire building is maintained at 65* minimum with 1,600 sq ft kept closer to 70*. The building is used primarily as a workshop but the owner and his wife practically live out there rather than in their house because it is so comfortable.
Building 2: 38x44 two story full log home plus basement built in 2007, one side of which is full walk out with 2- 9x7 overhead doors plus entry door. (parks his vehicles in there) The logs are 12' machined full Swedish cope chinking. Lots of glass on the South exposure and two glass sliders to the west, only 5 4'x4' windows in the rest of the house. The basement slab is 4" and the main and upper level are thin slab gypcrete. Ceiling roof combination that is 12" thick, main floor has cathedral ceiling in half with bedrooms and a loft area on second level. If you figured the house as three distinct floors you would have just over 5,000 sq ft of space.
Both heating system are set up nearly the same with the Windhager supplying 160-170* water to the main manifold and then using a mixing device to lower water temp to the level required for the floor. One key difference is that the pole structure has weather responsive injection mixing, the log structure uses regular thermostatic mix valves which are manually set to a fixed temperature.
One of these structure was heated with 8 tons of pellets this winter, the other used 15 tons.
Bear in mind that the pole barn has roughly double the cubic feet of heated space
I spoke with both of these people this week making my rounds and checking with customers to see how they did this winter.
Both buildings are heated with a radiant floor system and fired with identical Windhager pellet boilers.
Building 1: 80x80 pole barn construction, 6,400sq ft, new in 2008, 7-1/2" walls blown cellulose with 1/2 Tuff-R on the exterior, 16" cellulose in ceiling. 3" of foam under entire 6" slab with radiant floor heat. 3,200 sq ft of building has 16' ceilings, 3,200 sq ft with 9' ceilings. There are 12x14 overhead doors on the east and west walls of the tall part and 4 9x8 overhead door on the low part. 12 3x3 windows plus 4 standard sized entry doors. Entire building is maintained at 65* minimum with 1,600 sq ft kept closer to 70*. The building is used primarily as a workshop but the owner and his wife practically live out there rather than in their house because it is so comfortable.
Building 2: 38x44 two story full log home plus basement built in 2007, one side of which is full walk out with 2- 9x7 overhead doors plus entry door. (parks his vehicles in there) The logs are 12' machined full Swedish cope chinking. Lots of glass on the South exposure and two glass sliders to the west, only 5 4'x4' windows in the rest of the house. The basement slab is 4" and the main and upper level are thin slab gypcrete. Ceiling roof combination that is 12" thick, main floor has cathedral ceiling in half with bedrooms and a loft area on second level. If you figured the house as three distinct floors you would have just over 5,000 sq ft of space.
Both heating system are set up nearly the same with the Windhager supplying 160-170* water to the main manifold and then using a mixing device to lower water temp to the level required for the floor. One key difference is that the pole structure has weather responsive injection mixing, the log structure uses regular thermostatic mix valves which are manually set to a fixed temperature.
One of these structure was heated with 8 tons of pellets this winter, the other used 15 tons.
Bear in mind that the pole barn has roughly double the cubic feet of heated space
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. Not too far fetched to imagine a large log home needing something close to that though
. That's just wrong for new construction in 2007. Maybe not so bad for 1707 but there weren't many(ANY ?) 5000 sq ft log homes built back then and for good reason.
Now he has a little better understanding of why it's important to have the entire system designed correctly. It's not just the boiler.
