The U.S. geothermal heat pump industry was breaking out the champagne on Feb. 9, 2018.  That’s the day President Donald Trump signed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, a bill that boosted government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars.

We are proud to present the third of five eBooks specifically for the hydronics and radiant heating/cooling market. Brought to you by Plumbing & Mechanical, PM Engineer and Supply House Times, this eBook is a collection of columns and articles from John Siegenthaler, P.E., a well-respected hydronics expert and longtime columnist for PM, pme and Supply House Times.

A contractor is asked to design a hydronic heating system for a modest, super-insulated house in a cold Northern climate. The home’s design load is only 18,000 Btu/h. The owners are planning to install a 12 KW solar photovoltaic electrical system.

Have you noticed the strong interest in cold-climate air-source heat pumps over the last couple of years?

An installer was asked to include an air-to-water heat pump into a low-temperature radiant panel heating system supplied by a mod/con boiler.

One of the “delights” of designing hydronic systems is looking for synergistic opportunities, where one device provides multiple functions or benefits that would otherwise require two or more separate devices.

An installer sets up a zoned distribution system as shown below. To keep it simple, he uses the same size piping for the headers and all the distribution circuits. The heat source is a low-mass, copper-tube boiler with high-flow resistance.

In last month’s Hydronics Workshop column I described five devices that would, in my opinion, improve and expand the North American hydronics industry.  Here’s my “wish list” from that column:

The schematic in Figure 1 represents a drawing I recently reviewed for a proposed system that was to supply three zones of finned-tube based, two zones of low-temperature radiant panel heating, and an indirect domestic water heater.

All companies that supply hydronic heating hardware to the North American market strive to offer products that are currently in demand. Some even look farther down the road, anticipating where the market is headed.