I can live with the shop if it never got below 45-50°, but it would sure be nice to have it in the 60s.
#Loopcad forum series#
But maybe a cheap used WH in series with the free one I got already will be all Ill need? but thats a lot of extra work and cost for something that might need to be changed out anyway. Had one place say that they knew of a guy that ran two domestic water heaters in series to get the necessary BTUs into the water. Im just not sure where I should try and focus my researching energy, and from there, focus the funds on getting something in place. not like the weather is constant around here.īut getting varying reports, go tankless water heater, or go with a boiler, or a condensing boiler, or this or that. But all of them say its really hard to get an exact "what you need - calculation" and that you just have to over shoot some to be safe. and each percent seems to have a $ attached to it. Some say a tankless water heater, others say boiler, and then of course factoring in efficiency of either. I have talked with quite a few places that do this, and all of them have readily admitted, when they do it, they go off of the specifications that are sort of industry standard, but they all feel that they are at least a bit overkill up to way overkill.
And Im trying to figure out just what that is. The floor has stayed at a constant-ish 55-60°, but we are about where we can get something done with the heat side of things to make it right. Got a free LP 50gal water heater (36k btu) thinking that will at least keep from freezing. With the cold CO weather bearing down, I scrambled to get something in place to keep machines from freezing. Since we had to do this in stages so that we could afford it, the tubing obviously had to go in first when we poured the floor. But Im guessing that is just to maintain rather than "get a head" and since Im behind, it seems there is no getting ahead of the current 55-60° I have now. Based off of that, it says I need 90° water, and that it would take about 28000 btu/hr. I ran calculations as best I could, and used a program called loopCAD to get the tubing layout, flow, required water temp etc - it bases calculations off of insulation, geographic location etc. I tried to do a lot of research and planning ahead, as it was a "take one piece at a time" type deal due to money being tight.Įnded up with an 8 port evohot manifold (with flow meters and balancing valves on the return side) and 8 runs of 1/2" O2 barrier pex that are all 300 feet long +/- 3 ft (might even be closer than that, I was pretty anal about keeping all the runs the same length) We have a 2400 sq ft slab on grade for our insulated pole barn.