What makes a good residential HVAC system?
Older houses leaked and, to a degree, are uncomfortable and energy inefficient. We may think a cold room is standard in houses or a wood boiler needs to heat our house to 26C in the winter. We get use to opening windows in winter to…
Residential Vault by Uponor
We asked Uponor to put together a residential vault and they responded. We’ll be installing this 6-on setup on a client’s property this spring.
Adding Cooling to a Hydronic System
A fair amount of our work is not really “geothermal”. In this case, we are working with an existing boiler hydronic system converted to geothermal. The initial conversion functioned, but had poor climate control. Heat wasn’t all that adequate with the original staple up PEX…
Water to Heat Pump + Fan Coil + Radiant Floor Schematic
This particular posting is a reference drawing on a typical plumbing layout for a water to water heat pump, hydronic fan coil, radiant floor, and domestic hot water support. There are a number of variations likely in the plumbing: – the domestic hot water can…
Short Looping Two Units
This comes up often enough in our work that it is worth a post. When two or more heat pumps are pumped in parallel without thought given to flow, you can run in to some issues. Look at this figure: If only one heat pump…
Text Chat
With a very busy fall, we have been travelling a lot and not necessarily working in town. A client was getting worried about his geoexchange air/radiant system as the cold weather approached. I started off the texting early Saturday morning as I did not want…
10 Ton Header
This is not really about a 10-ton header, this is about the issues one needs to think about in header design. This is a picture of a 10-ton header we built. Now the header is for a residential property, with a bunch of (expensive)…
Service Calls
Yes, we take service calls. There are a lot of geoexchange systems in our area that no longer have the support of the original installer. I’ll leave it at that. But sometimes we do wish we did not take the call. Joking. Just some days you…
Mechanical Room Panorama
A recently completed mechanical room with two Waterfurnace water-water heat pumps, Tekmar controls, Wilo loop pump, and the usual mechanics. This is on 16-18′ of wall space. Apologies for the photo quality as this is a panorama (distortion) taken on a cell phone (lower quality)….
Why Rating a GeoExchange Heat Pump on Tonnage is a Bit of Bunk
We hear this all the time: “My heat pump is 4 tons”. “I need a 5 ton unit for my house”. This is based on the 12,000 btu’s = 1 ton of heat pump capacity. Also many manufacturers (almost all) label their units in a…
Tearing Apart a Pressurized FlowCentre
Pressurized flowcentres are a common method of pumping a ground loop to a heat pump. On a recent job, I came across a flowcentre that leaked. It leaked internally and this is not a simple fix. In this case, we replaced the flowcentre and had…