What Brand of IWB

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lager1

New Member
Feb 1, 2010
1
PA
I am adding a new garage and am looking to put in a indoor wood bolier. Can anyone give me thoughs on brand and problems wtih different brands. I will be adding radiant floor heat to !st. floor. Second floor will be forced air and forced air for garage. Thanks
 
First of all, welcome to the forum. You are in the right place. Very informed crowd here.

You will find many people willing to help you with narrowing down your choices on this site. They will ask you to provide more information about your particular situation. For example do you have a heat loss calculation done for all the areas you intend to heat? If not a detailed description of the sizes (sq ft) of the areas as well as type of construction type & R value of insulation that exists or that you are planning to install. This will get people started on helping you. Next they will want to know what works for your schedule, how often & how long you or someone else will be available to fire the boiler? Do you want to be able to leave the boiler unnattended for long periods of time without lighting a fire? (thats where storage comes in). There will be many more questions for you I am sure but answers to these will be a good start.
 
Sorry, forgot to respond to your question on brands. As far as this is concerned my only recommendation is to buy the highest quality your budget can afford (once you have narrowed down your choices to just a few models), boilers can & should last 20 years+ so very little if any reason to go the cheap route on a long term investment, quality usually pays for itself over time. As far as problems are concerned others I am sure others will give you their impression of the best quality unit (most if not all of these will be from the other side of the Atlantic), in the North American made market my choice for best quality/fewest problems/easiest to setup/operate is a GARN. Just my 2 cents.
 
You will obviously need to add water to air heat exchangers in order to utilize your current forced air setup. I would suggest two things in this regard:

1. That you oversize the water to air hx to be able to make use of lower temp water (like down 120-140*)
2. That you also do this for your first floor forced air even though you will have radiant. This is because floors do not respond very quickly to temp changes and in severe cold and wind might not keep up with your demand.

Another option would be to run baseboards or radiators and have a fully hyrdonic system. The forced air could still be a backup. These hx's are rather expensive and the cost may be similar or less.

As for brands, that depends on your exact application, but most gasser brands seem to have good reputations.
 
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