Here is my plan as of today.
Buy an Eko 80 (275 btu output) to replace 315,000 input 254,000 output oil boiler as the primary heat source for 10,000 sf highway garage which
currently uses 5,000 gallons of oil a year.
The current heat delivery system is radiant heat in a concrete slab.
There are about 20 separate loops and I believe several areas of zoned heat.
The concrete slab is about 10,000 sf at 6" thick.
That's 725,000 lbs of thermal storage or 1.45 million btu's for every 10 degrees of temp difference.
Since this is a work environment I think that we can get away with more fluctuation than would be tolerated in a residential environment.
Based on this reasoning I don't see any need for any extra thermal storage.
I would assume you can set the heat controls for the slab to accommodate a wider temperature variation.
Also one simple way might be to wire the circulator(s) for the radiant through the wood boiler.
They would only come on when the boiler is on or say when the heat in the boiler is above a certain temperature.
In this way you could almost ignore the thermostat except for maybe the few office areas which are zoned.
There are a couple of other issues.
The first is return heat temperature.
As I understand it all boilers - wood, oil, gas - require return temperatures of 140 or higher, otherwise condensation problems will result.
From what I gather there are mixing valves that take the output water and mix it with the incoming water in order to maintain that temperature.
I'm guessing that this might be more of an issue with radiant heat where the returning temp is lower than in the case of radiant heat.
Is this a problem?
How effective are these mixing valves.
Are there any other solutions.
Any other thoughts on the basic concept of using the concrete as the thermal storage?
Buy an Eko 80 (275 btu output) to replace 315,000 input 254,000 output oil boiler as the primary heat source for 10,000 sf highway garage which
currently uses 5,000 gallons of oil a year.
The current heat delivery system is radiant heat in a concrete slab.
There are about 20 separate loops and I believe several areas of zoned heat.
The concrete slab is about 10,000 sf at 6" thick.
That's 725,000 lbs of thermal storage or 1.45 million btu's for every 10 degrees of temp difference.
Since this is a work environment I think that we can get away with more fluctuation than would be tolerated in a residential environment.
Based on this reasoning I don't see any need for any extra thermal storage.
I would assume you can set the heat controls for the slab to accommodate a wider temperature variation.
Also one simple way might be to wire the circulator(s) for the radiant through the wood boiler.
They would only come on when the boiler is on or say when the heat in the boiler is above a certain temperature.
In this way you could almost ignore the thermostat except for maybe the few office areas which are zoned.
There are a couple of other issues.
The first is return heat temperature.
As I understand it all boilers - wood, oil, gas - require return temperatures of 140 or higher, otherwise condensation problems will result.
From what I gather there are mixing valves that take the output water and mix it with the incoming water in order to maintain that temperature.
I'm guessing that this might be more of an issue with radiant heat where the returning temp is lower than in the case of radiant heat.
Is this a problem?
How effective are these mixing valves.
Are there any other solutions.
Any other thoughts on the basic concept of using the concrete as the thermal storage?
