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ways to heat the slab
Friday, November 25 2011
Gretchen put homemade cinnamon rolls in the oven before she and I and our two houseguests took a short walk in the forest. The weather was sunny and warmer than one can normally hope for at this time of year. I was carrying coffee with me to drink in the forest, my second coffee-drinking day in a row (in defiance of all personal rules due to the holidays).
After Gretchen took the guests to the bus station, I fixed some things in the boiler room, including the laboratory zone valve (whose pump switch I was able to get working by gluing a rubber electronic device "foot" to the little metal finger that pushes it). I also finally finished the relay-based electrical controls for the slab heat exchanger that I'd built back in early 2006. There needed to be a switch to allow the heat exchanger's primary to be switched to "active" heating mode (instead of "passive," where heat flows to it by virtue of its being near the ceiling). I've found, though, that even "active" mode is insufficient to bring the slab up to a comfortable temperature in a reasonable time. When guests are coming (as they were yesterday), the solution is to partially-open a couple of the ball valves connecting the primary to the secondary hydronic circuits. This pushes some water directly heated by the boiler through the slab, heating it much faster than the heat exchanger can. Once warm, though, the heat exchanger can heat the slab indefinitely (and with little demand on the boiler).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111125 feedback
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