How To Design A Hot Water Baseboard Heating System For Your Home
How to design a hot water heating system, is an article that is being put together for people who are either building a new home or updating their heat to forced hot water hydronic baseboard.
Baseboard heating is one of the most popular ways to heat today. Even heat with no hot or cold spots and also a great efficiency rating make this an economically smart move.
Using a boiler for heating the water and pumps to circulate the heated water through pipes and into baseboard radiation, it's a simple system with only a few components that can possibly break down. When properly designed and installed, years of service can be obtained from most hot water heating systems.
When you begin to think about a system for your home, the first thing that will be needed is a heat loss. This is a group of variables that are used to size the boiler and the amount of baseboard each room needs to keep it within the comfort zone, no matter what extreme conditions exist outside.
Start by drawing a rough outline of the living space. This doesn't need to be a perfect to scale sketch as it will only be used to match measurements to rooms. Each area must be named for future reference.
Label the rooms out, giving each room a name such as living room kitchen etc. Make sure to label bedrooms with numbers like bedroom 1 and bedroom 2 to keep them straight. Bathrooms as well should be labeled bath 1 and bath 2 for how ever many you have. Once each room has a name, then we can measure the dimensions of each room and write it on the drawing where it goes.
Now count the outside walls in the room if there are two outside walls then write a two in this column. Each room should have an entry for how many walls are outside walls.
Next we need to record the ceiling heights for each room. If they are all the same height, then it's easy and there will only be one entry. Multi floor houses sometimes have different ceiling heights and this must be noted as well as the floor you are recording.
Exterior doors with glass must be measured where they exist and this is another variable that will be needed. Take the total measurement of the door as well as weather or not it is an insulated exterior door. Then if the door has a glass area within it this will need to be measured and recorded as well.
The final element to our heat loss will be windows. Take the outside measurement at the largest point of the glass. This is the area you need to record for each room. If a room has three windows and they are all the same size then you can just write 3 windows XX" x XX" and be done with it. If the windows in the room are different sizes then they must be listed individually.
Once a completed list with all of the above variables recorded is completed then you can neaten it up if you'd like. Make several copies of the resulting information and then find the local plumbing and heating supply houses in your area. These are the folks that are going to be competing to sell you the 5 thousand + system your trying to design and they will happily use their expensive software to calculate the results of your heat loss.
You will give them the numbers we've recorded and they will give you back a drawing of the home with the amount of baseboard needed for each room. They will also tell you what size boiler you will need to heat the home. Some will give you back better information then others and a price list for all the stock you need to install the system should be accompanying your returned heat loss. This allows you to compare prices. Keep in mind that the lowest price doesn't always mean the best deal and checking around for reputation is recommended as well.
So, this is How To Design A Hot Water Baseboard Heating System For Your Home, it will not help you install it. That my friends is a whole different article.
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