how to control those pumps

[rancherburn]

I have a owb and I would like to be able to shut of pumps when not calling for heat. I'm running two diffrent pumps to seperate buildings. Is there another way other than a line voltage thermostat where I will have to bury wire or do they make something wireless. All the new tech gadgets now days it's hard to keep up. thanks for any info.

 

[in hot water]

The new delta P pumps go into a sleep mode when the flow stops. They consume just a few watts to keep the circuitry powered up after the call for heat ends or the flow stops. Then they increase their speed as more load or zones open up. You would need a zone valve on both loads that would trigger the pump to ramp up in speed when it sees a flow requirement.

You basically wire them up, select the correct setting, and turn the power on and forget them... Grundfos Alpha, Wilo ECO Stratos are the two common ones. They both had a huge 40% price decrease at the end of last season so they are starting to get more attention.

(broken link removed to http://net.grundfos.com/doc/webnet/poweredby/gpu/US/alpha.html)


hr

 

[rancherburn]

thanks for the pump info it seems like a pretty easy fix i'll be looking into it. do you think I would need glycol or will the pipes hold enough heat to keep from freezing for say 10-12 hours

 

[in hot water]

the weak ling in OWF piping as far as freezing is where the pipes come out of the trench and connect onto the furnace. The underground piping would be safe. Those OWF hold a few hundred gallons typically and could go a day without freezing, depending on how cold it gets, of course.

Glycol in a system with that much fluid capacity would be very $$. It might be cheaper to buy a small generator to keep the fire and pump running during no power conditions.