John Siegenthaler: Hydronics Workshop

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Aside from the fact that they are all used in hydronic heating systems, what do the following items have in common?

As interest and incentives build to transition space heating and domestic water heating systems away from fossil fuels and toward electricity, a somewhat predictable but only marginally quantified problem is developing. Two words describe it: Peak demand.

For many years, I’ve been offering a free demo version of the “Hydronics Design Studio” software that I co-developed with my long-time colleague, Mario Restive. It’s there for the taking at www.hydronicpros.com.

If your office routine is anything like mine, you’re probably typing cryptic passwords into your desktop computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet throughout the day to access websites or cloud-based software that’s essential to your business.

I recently reviewed a project in which a municipal building was being connected to a district heating system supplied by pellet-fueled boilers.

The Coefficient of Performance (COP) of a heat pump is essentially the same concept as the thermal efficiency of a boiler (e.g., the desirable output divided by the necessary input).

With systems dating back into the 1800s, hydronic heating has been around a long time. As with many technologies, a modern hydronic heating system bears little resemblance to one based on the earliest design techniques and hardware.

The measure of a heat pump’s heating performance is called coefficient of performance (COP). It’s the ratio of useful heat output divided by required energy input, where both the output and input are expressed in the same physical units.