hot water tank/heat exchanger

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kchasse

New Member
Dec 26, 2015
7
maine
So I am looking to add a modine to my garage. I currently have a kerr wood boiler in parallel with my oil boiler. My idea is to use my hot water super store as a heat exchanger for my modine. I currently have an electric hot water tank for domestic. I would keep the coil going to my boiler to heat the tank to hotter than the normal 120 for domestic. I would then plump the.cold.and hot as supply and return. Add an expansion tank and be golden? I'm assuming it would also give me a buffer in that if I don't have a fire going but the garage needs heat I will already have some hot water dedicated to the garage. Would this work well or am I not thinking of something? Thanks in advance
 
Hopefully someone with a Modine will jump in, but you might need hotter water than that would make. Might depend on size of your space & heat loss too though.
 
I am going to be running about ten feet of pipe underground. How critical is it to get the best insulation on such a short run
 
My next question would be if I had the choice of going the shortest route but this would be under an area that is cleared of snow all winter would I be better to go a longer route but stay in areas that are covered with snow in winter?
 
I have a Modine in my unfinished basement and am getting by with MUCH lower water temperature. It is tied into my my main heating system which is driven off of thermal storage controlled by a shunt/mixing valve - the point is that I am using very low water temp to heat my house. The 2 keys are my Modine is controlled via a thermostat and not an aquastat within the unit ( I have a "toe/kick heater in the house that is controlled via an aquastat as well as a thermostat. I had to get a low temperature aquastat but when it is over 40 Degrees outside my flow temp of my heating water is too low to get the aquastat to kick in. The other key is that the blower will be running for much longer periods of time. Hope this helps.
 
What is the lowest temp water that you can heat with?
When outdoor temp is in the upper 50's I am running about 90 degree water. Having believed in I "need hot water", I would not have thought it would work but I just let it happen and my house stays at 72 degrees. I just joined the Forum and haven't played around yet but later tonight I can see if I can figure out how to add a screen shot or image file. I can show you the heat curve chart that drives my boiler, I programmed my condensing propane boiler to follow the same heat curve.
 
at 20 Degrees my flow temp is around 115. At negative 5 I will be running 133 Degree flow temp. As I just installed the mixing valve this year and it has been warm so far I cannot speak from experience. So far the heat curve that I am using has kept me toasty. Europe has been heating this was for many years so I have no reason not to believe that I will be fine. I have been on another thread where I gave a little more detail on my system, some of the info might be useful.
 
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