EKO60 system design help

[waterflea]

well I'm finally at the point where I can start thinking about how this system needs to work. I have included a drawing, crude
but hopefully effective. I'm sure it is going to need explaining, so here it goes.
My plan is to heat three different buildings with this boiler and 1500 gallons of storage. My house which is currently heated with
an oil fired boiler, the barn which is heated by a forced hot air furnace and is attached to the house and my shop which is
about 90' away. I have two 500 gallon tanks in the basement of the house. One on the floor,the other about four feet higher.
I also have a 500 gallon tank which will stand vertically in the shop. So you can see its a little different than your normal heating system.
I tried to draw a design based on nofossils simple diagram but need some help.
A control expert from the local pumping supplier did a different drawing but I think it over complicates the system. He started with a primary
loop that circulates through the house, barn and shop. every component of the system taps into the primary loop with its own circ. pump.
The primary loop has it's own pump, as do all four furnaces, the 1000 gallon storage component and the 500 gallon storage in the shop.
Any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Tony H]

I am no expert but from the reading I have done the fellow designing a primary / secondary loop system is probably on the right track. you have a complex system and will need some sort of controller setup to operate it effectivly.

 

[Nofossil]

I agree. My simple solution does not scale well to this level of complexity. One of the advantages of primary/secondary is that it scales very well. More complicated for a simple system, but well suited for something of the magnitude you're looking at. One area where the primary/secondary approach struggles a bit is with storage, since you want to charge storage with top-to-bottom flow and discharge it the other way around. That means some complexity in circulators and valves, and then you have the problem of the order of the two tees on the primary loop.

All that being said, there are plenty of people who have primary/secondary systems with storage.

I think Taco makes a tee that might help simplify the plumbing for this case.

Unless you get into variable speed circulators, storage also adds an enormous heat load when it's drawing heat. Normally, you'd just make storage the last load on the loop but you can't do that in this case.