Oil boiler bit the dust finally..

[cmonSTART]

Well, Friday when I was still in Indiana my wife called and said the furnace wasn't working. We had a friend over tonight who does HVAC and after a half hour of looking it over had a laundry list of things that were trashed with it. The furnace is 30 years old and has been nursed along since before we owned the house. It finally went. I guess we can't put this off any longer.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for hot water? It serves our DHW and baseboard backup heat. We'll probably just drop a newer more efficient unit in it's place but I wanted to entertain some thoughts you fine folks may have.

 

[DAKSY]

Well, now's the time to replace it. It should qualify for the 30% tax incentive with a newer, efficient unit.
I'm thinkin of eliminating the DHW from my oil boiler & going to an "on-demand" LP system, Rinnai, or similar...
I get tired of hearin the boiler firing up to pressurize the system & also coming on when we're taking our showers...

 

[Hurricane]

For the DHW I would put in a boiler mate. That is what they call it by up here I have also heard it called other names. The system is a tank that is attached to your boiler as another zone and the water from the boiler heats the water. The downside is the boiler will run in the summer, but the upside is when the boiler is running for heat you get the hot water as a bonus. The on demands are nice but they have low volume and are expensive.

 

[Gooserider]

Moved to the boiler room as more appropriate...

If you do want to keep burning dinosoars, it might be helpful if you mentioned what flavor, and what your options are...

Considering that you now have your CSIA cert (Congrats. BTW) - it might be worth thinking about the doing the "eat your own dogfood" thing and putting in a wood boiler.... :coolsmile:

Gooserider

 

[velvetfoot]

A Burnham boiler came with our place that's about 5 years old or so. It has that kind of water tank mentioned above that like a separate zone. It seems you never run out of hot water. It's probably only 84% efficient though.

 

[heaterman]

Given your location in NH you are right in Buderus' back yard. It would be hard to go wrong with one of their G115 or 215 boilers with a Riello burner on it. They also make an excellent indirect tank with an extremely heavy, high cobalt content porcelain liner. I've had a setup like that running a 6 unit apartment building for about 8 years now with zero problems and normal maintenance.

 

[peakbagger]

Most any efficient oil boiler will do. Its the controls that have gotten fancy and there is some potential savings with gong to better controls. A boiler mate is a good idea as long as you take the next step and have the boiler set up to cold start with an outdoor reset controller. The cold start setup only runs the boiler when there is a demand for heat, normally its sits cold and only heats up when the demand is there which is perfect for people who use a woodstove for their primary heat. Combined with a boiler mate, it saves a lot of energy in the summer as the boiler only cycles when the boiler mate is calling for hot water and the creative installation of a timer on the boilermate thermostat will keep the boiler mate from running during periods of the day when there is no demand. The outdoor reset controller, varies the temperature of the water that the boiler circulates for heat, it may or may not save you energy, as the savings in running a lower boiler temp are possibly offset in more electric cost for running the circulators and the burner.

About the best intergrated system is a system 2000. Unfortunately in many areas they have limited dealers and they tend to keep the prices up. Be aware that a lot of boiler service tecjs are well trained on the bunrer side of the business but when advanced controls get used they are less well trained. It took 3 techs and a supervisor 3 tries to get my parents new boiler set up. Eventually they got it and it works well, although the person who piped the system up was more into how it looked rather than efficiency and forgot to install thermal loops on the boilermate.

 

[EricV]

I'm buying the Buderus g115 and using the Intellicon 3250 controller. After lots of research and talking to folks here and elsewhere that seems the best unit for the price. I got a price of $1,821.00 for the 4 section unit with the Riello burner.

 

[cmonSTART]

Moved to the boiler room as more appropriate...

If you do want to keep burning dinosoars, it might be helpful if you mentioned what flavor, and what your options are...

Considering that you now have your CSIA cert (Congrats. BTW) - it might be worth thinking about the doing the "eat your own dogfood" thing and putting in a wood boiler.... :coolsmile:

Gooserider

Well, we have a full tank of oil so our options are either heating oil or install some LP which I wouldn't mind. The issue with the wood boiler is it has to serve our DHW all year so I can't imagine how much wood I would need to split to do that. We're definitely looking for something that will only heat water when we call for it and will heat enough to run some baseboards just in case we need to for some reason. Always have a back up.

 

[firefighterjake]

We have "hard" water where I live and the coil on my oil-boiler's domestic water heater was always needing to be fixed . . . plus I hated the idea of burning oil in middle of the summer. We switched to a stand-alone propane heater and we love it -- no issues, plenty of hot water . . . although I would be tempted to go with an on-demand system . . . perhaps next year . . . just to save more money.

 

[Gooserider]

Well according to those with gasifiers and storage, that use the wood boiler for DHW year round, they typically need to build a fire every 4-7 days, so the wood usage wouldn't be that bad. In actual practice, many folks add solar, so they don't need to burn at all in the Summer, and might get some help from it in the heating season. Another option for summer DHW is to get one of those heatpump based water heaters being discussed in the Green Room - claimed to be very low energy consumption, and give some level of air conditioning and dehumidifier action as a bonus.

I also agree that there is a need for backup heat on occasion - since you have the tank of oil already, why not look for a low cost minimal oil boiler (used?) to function as backup only?

Gooserider