How To Pipe A Multi Zone Hot Water Heating System
How To Pipe A Multi Zone Hot Water Heating System, is something that most people will find daunting and much too complicated to bother learning. The fact is if you are having a system like this installed it will be in your best interest to know a few things about how a multi zone system should be piped and what the finish product should look like.
This Hot Water heating system pictured above is a very nice example of a properly piped system with excellent workmanship and should provide years of trouble free service to it's owners.
Pipes all level and plumb with valves in a nice row and in their proper location. This is just a good sign that care was taken by the installer to make that little extra effort and produce a superior product.
To begin a multi zone system you'll find the ports in the boiler to hook your feed and your return. These are usually one and a half to three inch ports with female NPT threads. Npt standing for National Pipe thread and is a universally recognized type of thread that is widely used in plumbing and heating products.
These threads are sealed with pipe compound and wound together with their male counterparts to form a water and air tight connection.
Manifolds with tees for the correct number of anticipated zones can be purchased pre-fabbed from plumbing supply houses, or the installer can manufacture the manifolds on site. This is accomplished with again, the correct number of tees to accommodate the required amount of zones.
Most residential boilers will use an inch and a quarter main and one and a quarter by three quarter inch tees, to build ports for feed and return pipes from each room or zone.
Black threaded nipples are wound into the feed and return boiler ports, then usually each will get a brass ball valve, also threaded. This way the entire boiler will have the capability of being isolated just by turning off two valves.
Out of the valve another pipe and then our first tee for zone one, then a pipe and another tee for zone two and so forth and so on until we have a return manifold with ports for all zones and a feed manifold with the same amount of ports. We can then cap the inch and a quarter pipe end to allow for future zones to be added later.
Once our manifolds are built we can begin to take each feed out to the rooms radiation and then back to the respective return manifold port. Once this is accomplished for all zones we have successfully piped a multi zone hot water heating system.
Simple as it may sound there is not much more to this then whats written here. There are several other components that go in each zone along the way such as a pump for each zone and flow checks to prevent gravity feeding from overheating one zone when another one calls. We also have valves to isolate certain components for ease of servicing.
If you would like more information on this secondary equipment for hot water heating systems, there is more information below in the specific articles listed at the bottom of this page.
How To Pipe A Multi Zone Hot Water Heating System is not really that much more difficult then a single zone hot water heating system you just have to do it over and over again.
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