A technician installs a system to provide domestic hot water to a high end house with several bathrooms. Can you spot at least five details that are incorrect, and recommend how to fix this situation? 

The age-old question of function versus form has confounded experts in every field for countless decades.

Jeff Sweenor, president and CEO of Sweenor Builders in Wakefield, Rhode Island, looks at it differently. He asks, why not both? Function certainly comes first, but when the dust settles, his projects look as good as they work.

Scald protection valves are the last line of defense in protecting occupants from dangerously hot water in plumbing systems. Point-of-use mixing valves keep building occupants safe and enable a variety of important domestic hot water recirculation applications. How are designers using scald protection mixing valves to advance the broader topic of DHW recirculation?

The owner of a 107-year-old home sought an advanced hydronic heating solution for a major basement finishing project and to alleviate his existing heating woes on the first and second floors of the residence. The installation of an innovative and highly efficient boiler from Weil-McLain helped make the basement remodel a success and the family’s home comfortably warm throughout.

An installer is asked to provide a system that supplies two zones of fin-tube baseboard and two zones of floor heating.

Many older commercial facilities today, especially larger, multi-story facilities with plumbing and mechanical systems that may date back 10 or 20 years, have domestic water systems with a consistency problem. 

An installer pipes up the system shown in Figure 1. Its purpose is to provide two zones of space heating.  

I recently designed a system for my daughter’s new home with a water-to-water geothermal heat pump as its main heat source.