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Blecher_onthe_Hudson OP t1_j25yaxn wrote

Reply to comment by robin_tern in Did your heating fail to keep your temp up last weekend when it was below 10 deg? by Blecher_onthe_Hudson

Funny, didn't even occur to me to adjust the water temperature up on my own boiler. We just put on sweaters! The heaters are being fed from the hot water heater which is set to its top temperature of around 140.

The issue isn't the BTUs of the water heater but of the the radiators. I could have gained 15% with the higher fan speed but I think expecting a tenant to screw around turning up and down the fan speed when there's a cold snap is probably too much. Or is it? Same thing with the fan noise, anyone like us with window air conditioners just sucks it up about the noise, and the higher fan speed is far less noisy than an air conditioner, but I'm hesitant to go there.

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SonOfMcGee t1_j2700g1 wrote

I used to own a small condo in town that did both hot water and heat (standard baseboard radiators) from a single hot water heater. It was a nifty little system. The heat was just controlled by a recirculation pump connected to the thermostat. Meanwhile on the hot water side, there was a mixing valve with a temperature-sensitive element that would blend in cold water to prevent scalding.
This meant we could turn the water heater up to its max setting for the purpose of more powerful heating but still get safe water out the tap.
Is this how your place is set up (aside from it not being baseboard)?

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Blecher_onthe_Hudson OP t1_j27bzke wrote

Exactly so. I imagine the size threshold of where it works to be rather small, but mine are 450' and it works fine, without the complexity of boilers or expensive & finicky direct vent mod-con tankless boilers. Also, doing the direct vent on an attached rowhouse can be pretty difficult.

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EliotHudson t1_j28gddk wrote

You mentioned window air conditioners. Do you by chance still have them in the windows? Because when people forget to remove them from the windows during the winter season it’s like having huge holes in your walls.

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Blecher_onthe_Hudson OP t1_j290nw9 wrote

Lol, yes that's true, and I sometimes have to tell tenants to get their conditioners out. But no the the ACs are out. The really stealth heat leak is when people don't actually shut their windows all the way. They close it so that there's no opening at the bottom but very often the sashes are not meeting in the middle and air is blowing through. You have to be sure the two sashes are meeting properly and use the window locks which pull them together. Every fall I have to go around the house checking each and every window to make sure it's actually closed.

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