Here are some design principles for hydronics that guide my thinking now.
In the last few years I’ve spoken with hundreds of fellow “hydronicians” (as Btu guru Mark Eatherton calls them). The wide variety of “previous lives” many of us had B.B. (Before Boilers) always amazes me. Among our ranks are former grade school teachers, missionaries, roofers and even ballet dancers. I originally wanted to be an aerospace engineer, and actually came within a semester of doing so in college. But the then emerging field of solar energy technology was just too much of a distraction. All that “free” energy shining down out there. Who needs fossil fuels anymore? Besides, what fun is it to design cruise missiles all day?
And now the scary part: Sitting there in the dorm one night I thought, wouldn’t it be great to apply some of this complex aerospace technology to the task of scooping up those solar Btus. Hence the start of my career in the energy field. My guiding principle back then was simple: Never let a Btu escape without submitting to whatever my new contraption expected of it. Grab it, move it, store it, squeeze it, stretch it, meter it out in the smallest possible increments, but always make sure it knew who was in charge. If doing so required complicated control hardware and racks of relays, so be it. After all, I had it on “good authority” that the world would run out of anything but solar Btus in another 30 years or so.