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Posted by daestrom on December 11, 2007, 4:48 pm
> Hallo,
>
> I was wondering if anyone has heard of a building which uses hydronic
> heating / cooling in an innovative way:
>
> The coils are installed into all elevated concrete floors as well as
> into the basement slab-on-grade (and underground walls). By
> circulating the water through the pipes, the building can be
> conditioned without using external energy (besides for the heat
> exchanger for the heating, because the basement isn't warm enough to
> heat the upper floors).
>
> I know of successful buildings like this in Europe, but was hoping
> this had been done in the US, and that I could find information on it
> here.
>
Of course the circulating pumps draw a small amount of energy whenever
they're running, but that should be pretty small compared to conventional
furnace / A/C load.
In many commercial buildings it is common to use heat-pumps in each space
that are attached to a building circulating water loop. In the winter time,
a building near work doesn't use any *extra* energy to heat it since some
heat-pumps cool rooms with heat-generating equipment, dumping the heat into
the building water loop, while other heat pumps in other rooms extract heat
from the loop to heat their respective rooms. So this effectively
re-distributes the heat to where it's needed from where it isn't wanted. Of
course heat-pumps, even when operating with a low temperature difference
across them, draw quite a bit more power than just circulating pump.
In my own home I occasionally start the blower on the furnace just to move
warm air from the rooms facing the sun into rooms that aren't so as to even
out the temperatures. I'm not so sure that hydronic controls can be
overriden so easily as my flipping the blower switch to 'man', but perhaps.
I don't think that 'radiators' or hydronic baseboards would work very well
at all for 'cooling'. Their placement is designed around the phenomenon of
the air being heated by the hydronics and creating a circulation. Wouldn't
get that from cold water in the piping.
daestrom
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