Fire2020 wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 6:27 pm
But even after 4-5 hours the concrete is barley luke warm.
At any rate, we left the heat on, everywhere in the new house, for a week straight and it burned through 700 gal of propane in a week. It barely got any warmer. The outlet temp of the boilers was 140 degs and the return pipe was luke warm to the touch.
There are 13 zone valves over the two boiler systems. My HVAC guy told me there was no way to isolate each zone such that he could purge the air out of each individual loop... that there was just one global valve to purge air from the system as a whole. He said he would have to install a manifold in order to blow out the individual loops. So I'm not sure if that's BS or I'm not explaining it correctly?
As you say, on the positive side, we never really have to worry about cooling the house. Even in summer the house never gets above 78 degs. I get how thermal inertia works to help maintain even temps. Very different than insulation.
The floors should be luke warm to the touch when it's running, that's normal. That means the heat is leaving the floor and going somewhere. How about the bare rock walls? Are they luke warm to the touch or still cold?
700 gals of propane in a week with no change in ambient temperature inside the house? So you either have a massive propane leak(unlikely inside the house, as your house probably would have exploded by now) or you have a serious heating problem. I can think of a few scenarios that would fit this problem:
1: There is no insulation at all anywhere in the house, such that you are heating the earth under your house plus your thick rock walls plus the air outside the house, etc. You probably can't check under the house easily to see if there is any insulation there, but you probably can check everywhere else to see if there is anything resembling insulation. Don't forget to check the ceiling/attic/roof space.
2: Your pipes don't go where you think they go and/or the zones you think you have you don't really have and something else is getting all of that heat.
3: You have a massive air lock. One way to solve this is to ensure you have an air eliminator installed and do a systemwide purge across all 13 zones at once(which should be totally possible, but annoying). Manifolds might be required to purge individual loops, but you don't really care about that, small bubbles won't cause what you are seeing. With an air eliminator system, assuming you're circulating the water appropriately, the small bubbles will work themselves out over time anyway.
4: You aren't really circulating the water and you are just heating the space where the boilers are.
You have contact with the people that put the system in originally it sounds like. I'd try to get them to come back and verify everything and explain the system to you, so you know how it all works, and hopefully they can make sure everything works as they designed it.
Something is clearly wrong, and it will take some detective work to figure out. You either have to get digging into it and figure it out yourself or hire someone competent that can figure it out for you. That probably means they will have to do an energy study and spend hours and hours at the house doing stuff. This won't be cheap, but for a competent team, they should be able to figure out the problem and figure out a solution.
If I was going to dig into investigating myself, I would get thermometers everywhere I could, including under the house and around the outside edges of the house, along various parts of the floor, ceiling, etc. Don't forget around the boiler and ambient air temps(ideally low along the floor, normal height and up near the ceiling and the roof across the whole house). I'd monitor these religiously over the course of a week/month/season, writing it all down and finding out the patterns.. This should be able to tell you where in the world all that heat is going. 700 gals of propane a week has to be going somewhere. Maybe an outside propane leak? Your job is to figure out where.
Whether rich or poor, a young woman should know how a bank account works, understand the composition of mortgages and bonds, and know the value of interest and how it accumulates. -Hetty Green