Well sure, one should never underestimate the resourcefulness of the man, metaphorically speaking.

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of karmic justice though.

Did you know that they sold compression tee fittings designed to do exactly what I needed? Me neither. But they do: BrassCraft 3/8 in. x 3/8 in. x 3/8 in. Compression x Compression T-fitting-CT2-666X P at The Home Depot

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1387740021

Getting the old hose decoupled from the lower outlet and the dishwasher hardline re-attached while water was gushing out made a bit of a mess, but after that was cleaned up, the tee installed on the upper outlet (the one which feeds the faucet) gave me a place to then install a secondary valve to regulate the feedwater through the system so that the wall-valve can remain fully open. This one is rated as a boiler drain valve, so I assume it can handle some temperature and pressure.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...8&d=1387739612

I must say that I find the presence of the dishwasher quite annoying here. This is an extremely small kitchen, and I'd have far preferred that space be given over to a double-basin sink and a bit of extra storage. Who the fuck uses dishwashers, anyway? They might as well have installed an automatic alpaca shearer for all the use I'll get out of it. (And then I could tell people about how my apartment has an built-in alpaca shearing machine, which would be an interesting conversation starter.)

I lived without one for almost 2 years. never again.

Karmic justice is that someday, years from now, someone is going to enter this apartment for the purpose of servicing this stupid, pointless dishwasher. They're going to turn that valve fully clockwise and assume that this has shut off the water, and then they'll uncouple the compression fitting without thinking anything of it.

Except they won't have a pan and a bunch of towels at the ready.

You know what would have been nice in that hole instead of a dishwasher? A combination clothes washer/dryer. That is something that most normal people actually use on a regular basis. Hell, I'd have even been ok with just a big empty hole, and a little plaque saying "feel free to purchase your own washer/dryer combo and stick it in this spot."

I'm still amazed you were able to pull off such a feat without the water pressure turned off. Is there not a lot of pressure in your apartment there? Or is the angle stop still able to hold back quite a bit even though it's imminently failing? Anytime I have ever tried replacing a pressure valve with the system still under pressure, it has resulted in massive failure and one sad, soggy kitten.

Well, think about the procedure for capping a blown wellhead. You don't just plug the thing directly, you install an open valve over top of it, then close the valve. A valuable lesson which I learned as a teenager.

Since I was re-attaching the dishwasher to its original supply port, I used the dishwasher itself as the valve. Turned it on and set it to the beginning of a cycle, causing the solenoid inside to open. That, plus the fact that the faucet on the wall is stuck at perhaps 1/3 capacity (just guessing based on what I observed coming out of the drain line after the failure), made it possible to get the fitting re-installed. It was messy, and squirted quite a bit while I was getting everything lined up, but it worked.

Without what, a dishwasher?

I guess...

Personally, I've never seen the point. Every place I have lived has always had a dishwasher, and I have always used it is a dish-drying rack. In this kitchen I can't even do that, as the door sticks out right into the middle of the kitchen, nearly touching the opposite wall. Still, It's not as though washing a few dishes is especially difficult or time consuming. If I were running a commercial kitchen and producing 5,000 pre-packaged airline meals a day, then I might feel otherwise. But for the volume of dishes that any young couple and their nine cats are likely to use in a day, it just seems un-necessary. As I said, I'd much rather have a machine there to do something which I cannot easily accomplish by hand in a few minutes.

http://pisces.bbystatic.com/image2/B...anvasWidth=500

See, there's your problem; Everybody knows that kittens simply cant handle the torque required for a job like that, you need to use a full grown, sizable cat. Preferably a neighbors, because who wants to go to sleep in a house with a very grumpy sizable cat waiting to exact it's revenge?

Not me.

I suppose an extremely large and particularly durable kitten might do the trick in a pinch, say a Maine Coon Cat or a Domestic Shorthair With An Overactive Pituitary, but for a good safety margin I always go for a grown cat. Again, not your own grown cat if possible.

So I came home last night to find the carpet under the radiator to be somewhat moist.

Puzzling...

Shut down the system, drained it, and had a look down the filler neck:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1391480958

I'm going to pause here for a moment to reflect on the wisdom of my insistence all these years on running nothing but distilled water in the cooling systems of my various engines.


It would appear that the radiator has become almost entirely plugged with the precipitate resultant from the reaction between our high-mineral-content water and the aluminum of the radiator. I can only speculate at this point (having not yet performed a teardown and failure-mode-analysis) that the core became so plugged that its resistance to the flow of water become so great as to cause a pressure differential approaching that of the line pressure at flowrates sufficient to produce a satisfactory delta-T across the core.

I don't have an accurate measurement of the pressure of the potable water in this building, however 50-70 PSI seems to be a typical standard, and that is many times in excess of the relief pressure of the radiator cap. I suspect that the core has been continuously exposed to a pressure differential of 20-30 PSI (or more), and that this cause a minor failure at one of the core-to-tank seams. (The cap is on the low-pressure side of the core, or else I'm certain it would have started venting long ago.)


I suppose I could redesign the system such that the cap is on the high-pressure side, and the overflow line acts as a bypass across the radiator back into the low-pressure side. That would leak-proof the system, though it wouldn't prevent the radiator from becoming blocked by condensate in the first place...

Can someone with a better understanding of inorganic chemistry than I propose a solution to this problem which does not involve the purchase of a water softener?

^^ Vinegar injection ;)

Use a copper radiator.

All home water heaters (and many outboard motors) have a sacrificial anode to prevent corrosion. I'm not sure if that will help with what appears to be calcification, but from looking at it it couldn't hurt. Is there a chemist in the house?

I wish I know enough about chemistry to actually know whether copper / brass is going to be less readily affected by this phenomenon than aluminum.

I have to assume so, given that the plumbing pipe in this building is copper, but then I don't really understand why the aluminum attracts these minerals so readily in the first place.

Nanosized particles catalyze the Aluminum + Water reaction. If you send me a nice sized sample of the residue, I can confirm that it is probably bayerite or a similar mineral.

Here is an interesting article that has almost nothing to do with what we are talking about.

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogen...r_hydrogen.pdf

seems like the man has started sticking it back to Joe...

Why not just stick a cheap in-line filter into the supply hose? Something like you'd find at any big box home improvement place. Filters are cheap.

Use CLR to remove the buildup in the radiator. Stuff works great.

I'd be happy to send you a chunk of it if you think there's something useful to be learned from that process.



And to think that over the weekend, I was complaining about the exceedingly soft water coming out of the shower at the GF's place up in the mountains- I can never quite tell when I'm actually rinsed off, because it still feels kind of oily.




Are those effective at removing dissolved minerals? And can they handle extremely hot water?

Probably not.

Further research seems to suggest copper radiators are still soldered together, and that the solder is susceptible to similar degradation when in contact with shitty water.

If you can check your copper fittings and they don't seem to have any deposits, then one solution could be to buy some copper hardline and bend it into a loop, thus making your own radiator out of material which has proven immune to the catastrophe.

I believe it would filter out the majority of the calcium, which is what most scale is comprised of.

Not sure if it would stand up to the heat, though. Most undersink ones are for the cold side only.

I do not believe that a filter that is not actually a water softener will remove dissolved calcium.

In for picture of large coil of thin copper tubing in the corner of Joe's apartment that makes it look like a distillery. Or Joe trying to pass it off as a piece of industrial art to girlfriend.

I suspect part of the problem is that, since you are indeed using hot water, it has already reached an elevated mineral level in the process heating. You can usually taste the difference between your hot and cold tap water, which is the main reason why you never start with hot water for making pasta, soup, coffee, etc..

Perhaps, as a cleaning regimen, you could just periodically run the radiator in a close loop with an (aquarium pump or something) while filled with a vinegar or CLR solution.

The hot water would certainly carry a lot more dissolved minerals, and would deposit them as it cools. I suspect your best solution would be to clean it periodically somehow. I am no expert in that though.

Calcium is like impossible to get off. You need a freakin chisel.

You are in an apartment? Do you have a balcony? Can you do something like this? How to Build a DIY Solar Air Heater from Old Soda Cans : TreeHugger

Redesign that to work with whiskey bottles and Joe'll be in like flynn. :giggle:

His ambients are sub zero right now so convection may not be the most efficient option.

This is what I have come to understand as well.


Ironically, I used to own exactly this device. It's called a counterflow chiller, and is used to rapidly cool beer (well, wort) during the process of racking from the kettle into the fermenter. I made mine from 50' of 3/8 OD copper tubing stuffed inside a 50' length of garden hose.

You pass the beer through the copper tubing from top-to-bottom, and pump sink-temperature water through the hose from bottom-to-top. Once you get it set up correctly, the beer exits the bottom at nearly room-temperature.

Looks like this:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1392090688

Sadly, I parted company with it when I left CA.



I'm curious as to how raising the temperature of water causes an increase in the level of dissolved solids within it.



Yes, no, no.



However, I have had an idea.



This past weekend, as with most of late, I was at the woman's place up in the Catskills. She retains a modest little 1br cottage out in the woods, with deer prancing by the front window and whatnot. Very rustic.


https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1392089745

(It's surprisingly inexpensive, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity. As a sidebar, I have come to learn that I am what the locals refer to as a Citiot, being a portmanteau of City + Idiot. Eg: a resident of New York City who spends his weekends contaminating the small towns of upstate New York like something out of My Cousin Vinny. Well, guilty as charged.)


A minor part of said rusticism is a complete absence of common municipal utilities such as water and sewer. (This is a rather interesting and unique concept for us city-folk.)

So this past Saturday, as I was performing field expedient repairs upon the pressure-equalizing tank on the well pump (a ruptured diaphragm caused the system to gradually go solid, with attendant short-cycling of the pump and irregular water pressure), I happened to notice for the first time that the house has no furnace.

I mean, I was cognizant of this previously, but the implications of it had failed entirely to register with me. The house is heated entirely by baseboard radiators, supplied by the same boiler which provides for the potable domestic hot water system. What I mean is that I really grokked this in fullness.

In other words, this house is equipped with the exact thing that I have been attempting to accomplish!

Apparently, this is actually a common thing up here in the frigid northeast. It's a concept with which I was completely unfamiliar until just recently, but I gather that the idea of passing hot water through a radiator as a means of heating the home is not nearly so novel as I had originally thought, to the point where several different companies actually produce radiators intended specifically for this purpose, and with copper cores, no less.

Examples:

Shop Hydrotherm 8-ft Hydronic Baseboard Heater Enclosure at Lowes.com

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1392090688


Slant/Fin Fine/Line 30 6 ft. Hydronic Baseboard Fully Assembled Enclosure and Element-101-401-6 at The Home Depot

http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/pro...30780_1000.jpg




I believe that I may give one of these a try. An 8' unit would fit nicely in the bedroom to the side of the bed, and if it turns out to be a viable option, I could easily accommodate a second 8' strip in the living room behind the sofa. Collectively, those would give me a lot more surface area than I had with the little go-kart radiator, which should make up for the lack of forced-air circulation.

If I really decide to get fancy, I can source bedroom water from the bathroom, and living-room water from the kitchen, and thus avoid having a hose strung across the hallway altogether.


Now, all I need to do is figure out how to transport a pair of 8' long radiators on a bicycle.

As I understood it, there is an inverse relationship between temp and calcium solubility. As the temperature goes up, calcium solubility goes down. Additionally, there the continual added mineral contribution due to the erosion of whatever sacrificial anode is in the boiler tank, and/or the actual tank itself. Of course, this all builds up over time, so where your particular boiler system is in its life cycle will undoubtedly affect the ambient concentration level of minerals swirling about.


Ah hell Joe, here's the damn wiki:

Limescale is the hard, off-white, chalky deposit found in kettles, hot-water boilers and the inside of inadequately maintained hot-water central heating systems. It is also often found as a similar deposit on the inner surface of old pipes and other surfaces where "hard water" has evaporated. Other than being unsightly and harder to clean, limescale seriously impairs the operation or damages various components.[1]

The type found deposited on the heating elements of water heaters has a main component of calcium carbonate. Hard water contains calcium (and often magnesium) bicarbonate and/or similar ions. Calcium salts, such as calcium bicarbonate and calcium carbonate are both more soluble in hot water than cold water. Thus, heating water does not cause calcium carbonate to precipitate per se. However, there is an equilibrium between dissolved calcium bicarbonate and dissolved calcium carbonate:

Ca2+ + 2HCO3- ⇋ Ca2+ + CO32- + CO2 + H2O

where the equilibrium is driven by the carbonate/bicarbonate, not the calcium. Note that the CO2 is dissolved in the water.

There is also an equilibrium of carbon dioxide between dissolved in water (dis) and the gaseous state (g): CO2(dis) ⇋ CO2(g)

The equilibrium of CO2 also moves to the right towards gaseous CO2 when the water temperature rises. When water that contains dissolved calcium carbonate is warmed, CO2 is removed from the water as gas causing the equilibrium of bicarbonate and carbonate to shift to the right, increasing the concentration of dissolved carbonate. As the concentration of carbonate increases, calcium carbonate precipitates as the salt: Ca2+ + CO32- ⇋ CaCO3.

As new cold water with dissolved calcium carbonate/bicarbonate is added and heated, CO2 gas is removed, carbonate concentration increases, and more calcium carbonate precipitates.

Interesting...

See, I knew I needed to consult a chemist here.

I'm curious on a twofold level here...

A: If I'm interpreting that correctly, then the precipitation of solid calcium carbonate should occur within the boiler during the heating process, not in my radiator during the cooling process, especially since the system is essentially closed between the boiler and the radiator, with no obvious source for gaseous CO2 to be re-absorbed.

B: Why does the aluminum radiator seem to be uniquely sensitive to this precipitation, while the copper plumbing of the building has survived several decades without becoming completely plugged up?

perhaps it is more mechanical in nature rather than chemical. Consider the surface area your internal radiator is exposed to vs the copper tube in a pipe(or the radiators you posted)

I just had the chemist guy here yesterday testing the water in our closed loop hot water system here. I now wish i could ask him questions.

I'm not a chemist, or even a boiler guy. But i am in a boiler room now. What i do know is that every heat exchanger happens to have copper pipes (with aluminum fins). All the hot water passes through regular galvanized pipe until it reaches the heat exhanger when it is changed to copper. Sometimes brass fittings are used too. I also know the PH level for the system is checked every month(by the guy that was here yesterday). I'm positive we have a softner that fixes the domestic water before it enters the closed loop system.

To answer B. "In areas with neutral-pH water, copper pipes resist corrosion by forming a thin protective coating inside of the pipe and keep their structural integrity well."

Aluminum doesn't do that, no idea why.

I would still go to home depot and get the carbon whole-house filter and try it. It is not a softener, but DID do a good job of removing crap in my water that was precipitating out in the form of white gunk and pink gunk.

I have decided that it is time for me to stop tip-toeing around the issue, and that I am best served to simply take off and nuke this problem from orbit.

Parts have been ordered, more details should be forthcoming within a day or two.

FWIW, copper pipes in homes in certain areas around here are dissolved by the hard tap water. They become paper thin and fail within 20 years unless you have a softener. That can be exciting when the slab or drywall erupts. They then replumb the house with pvc through the attic.

That reminds me, I'm due to replace the sacrificial anode in my water heater.

Yeah, I recall as a kid that we had the same problem down in Charlotte County FL as well- the failures tended to start as pinhole leaks. The only one we ever got was actually below the slab, which required quite a bit of excavation to reach.

My mother's new house, which was built around 2000 or so, has rigid CPVC in the attic. And from what I gather, they're actually staring to use PEX in a lot of new-construction, which should be even better (resistant to bursting when frozen, extremely easy to de-mate and re-terminate, etc.)

I lived in a house with a water-softener in 2003-4, and I have no desire to ever repeat that experience. I just detest that slick, slimy feeling that you get in the shower, wherein you can never quite tell if you're actually clean and rinsed off or not.

Wait, is the idea of running hot water through a floorboard radiator for heat or the idea of combining heat and hot water sources an unfamiliar concept?

Both.

When you've spent most of your life in Florida, Southern California and the Caribbean, you aren't exposed to a lot of different concepts in home heating. I did live in Ohio for several years, but my house there had a ducted, forced-air heating system which was functionally identical to what I'd experienced elsewhere, only with nat-gas rather than electricity as the primary source of thermal energy.

While I am vaguely familiar with the notion of the old cast-iron radiators through which steam is allowed to pass, it had never occurred to me that pumping hot, potable water through finned radiators was actually a common thing in "normal" homes of the present day in north America.

You need to get out more, Joe.

Does Catskill / Hudson / Cairo not count as getting out?!

I'm not sure how much more "out" it's possible to get than this, short of exiting the Earth's atmosphere.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...&d=13921463094


If you just mean exposure to different heating systems, then I'm sorry if I'm not as well-versed in 19th century HVAC technology as some people. Down south, we worry more about not dying of heat-stroke in the summer than about how to keep warm on those frigid 50° nights. :rolleyes:

Outside is scarry. There are big kitties out there

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1392150055

This is sorta on topic.

You would be shocked to find what's in your potable water.

The building i work in is pretty dang old, i'm not sure how old, but i do know it's been through more than one renovation. During the last one the newest hot water heater was installed. More than likely by a 3 year old.
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1392164843
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1392164843
We keep our hot water at 150F which is way to damn hot, but OSHA or something.
It has been reeking havoc on the pipes, which is on the plate for a job i need to do here soon. Though it's hard to shut an entire buildings hot water off for an extended period of time.

Now i had to laugh a little at the post about deteriorating copper pipes.
This is what happens when you pass 140F water though galvanized pipes.
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1392164843

Now take a guess at how often i have to replace galvanized pipe that's sprung a leak.
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1392164843
Most recently the main coming into the building.

Which could throw me into a "Joe Perez" style rant about how the infrastructure of this country is getting worse and worse by the day and nothing is being done about it.

Double post, this site is getting slow i think.

^Aging infrastructure is possibly because you are in Detroit. Most of the subterranean infrastructure here is less than 40 yrs old because of consistent growth. Since each local municipality is responsible for their own systems it is difficult to see that as a national problem. That being said, all too often municipalities spend HUGE sums of money on planting flowers and trees, buying private property to develop into parks, renaming roads or "modernizing" street signs, rather than replacing or restoring ancient and decaying underground utilities. But replacing or relining gravity sewer mains or freshwater transmission lines doesn't get you reelected. Underground pipes aren't sexy.

SEVERAL BLOCKS!

Water main break traps Detroit Police officers, puts neighborhood under water | News - Home

I saw a report somewhere where someone said they were having 10 a day... That's impossible to keep up on. I believe it's more than just the cold, though it's not helping.

By which you mean a bunch of dissolved alkaline metals (calsium, sodium, magnesium), some chlorine, trace amounts of a few heavy metals, some halides, a touch of bacteria... Kind of a whole soup. Here's the latest water quality report for NYC: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/wsstate12.pdf The complete breakdown is on pages 10-11. Did you know that NYC is one of only five cities in the entire country whose water supply is so pure that the EPA does not require it to be filtered?




Have at it, my friend! :bigtu:



Also, phrase for the day: "Hydronic Fan Convector." That's apparently the proper name of the thing I built out of the go-kart radiator.

After reading through your drinking water spec sheet i had to look up ours.
Shockingly it's pretty clean.
http://www.dwsd.org/downloads_n/cust...ity_report.pdf

The units are different and i don't really care to convert, so it's hard to compare. I do know our water is actually pretty good too. You figure we have a lot of fresh water to pick from.

Like i kinda said in my post though, a lot of contamination comes from the old crappy building you happen to be in at the time.
Basically the longer the water has to go, the worse it gets as my pictures suggest.

Behold, the Beacon/Morris Twin-Flo III model K120 hydronic fan-convector:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1392261676

If I've done the math properly, this should be good for around 7,000-8,000 BTU/hr given my water supply, which is about 80% of the faceplate capacity of the big, noisy, expensive PTAC unit in my wall. Equivalent to about 40 feet of the baseboard radiator I was looking at earlier. We'll know for sure once it's fired up and I can take some pre/post measurements.

Should be enough to turn the bedroom into a sauna when running at 100% DC, might even be adequate for the whole apartment with a few bucks worth of dryer hose thrown in.

All-copper construction on the water-facing side. And, conveniently, 5/8" OD nipples, exactly the same as the hose I already have.



As an aside, I finally got around to dismantling the old radiator to perform a FMA, and as I suspected, the core is nearly 100% blocked. Water poured into the upper tank trickles slowly out the lower. So there's no question, that poor little thing was seeing nearly nearly full line pressure, well in excess of its design-basis capacity.

By comparison, the new radiator is rated for a working pressure of 100 PSI, and a test pressure of 150 PSI, which is well above the typical domestic water pressure. (I haven't measured it here, but 40-70 seems to be the commonly cited range of nominal values.)

I'd still prefer the base board radiators. They're quieter, don't stick out like a sore thumb, heat more evenly, and don't use electricity. The twin-flo III does have the coolness factor though.

The base board system would work better in a closed loop system. But the way Joe has it, he would have to much waste.

These work well and are very reliable.

Hot damn, Joe. Well done.

Yeah, open loop, you want to extract every BTU out of the water flow possible; the fan makes sense. In for results.

If I may make a suggestion: Put some sort of restrictor on the output side. Unless you have complete fill of the piping, you won't be getting efficient heat transfer to the pipes, and will be sending a lot of heat down the drain.

No idea what to use, or how much is needs to be blocked off. Just saying you need something in there unless you don't care about efficiency.

Simple ball valve would suffice. It won't be a regulator but a restrictor but given a reasonably steady waterline pressure it should perform fine.

(and)Well, there were several factors which drive the decision here.


As to the purported cons of the Twin-Flo, the motor draws only 66 watts at high speed, and is fairly quiet. (I actually like a bit of white noise at night to compete with the diesel locomotives just outside my window.) Additionally, it is highly efficient, claiming appx. 9,000 BTU/hr from 1 GPM of 125° water on 65° air. (I estimate that this is roughly double the heat output I was getting from the go-kart radiator, given that that system seemed to max out at around 0.5 GPM)


In favor of the Twin-Flo, it is extremely compact and lightweight, which is important given how frequently I move. I can also pick it up and carry it from one room to another, just as I used to do with the go-kart radiator. And I know from experience that, with forced-air, I can extract damn near all the useful energy from the water (lowering the outflow to nearly room temperature), which allows me to keep the flowrates reasonable.


Weighing against the baseboard, obviously, are size, weight, cost, and lack of portability.

Additionally, the efficiency on those units is not high. The datasheet for the Slant/Fin "Baseline 2000" series claims about 230 BTU/hr per linear foot at 125°, presupposing 4 GPH. In other words, you need to run the water through quickly enough that the outflow temp is very near the inflow temp. This is fine and dandy in a two-loop closed system where you're recovering the water and re-using it, but not really practical in my application.

Huh?

Getting complete fill is easy. You just turn the water flow up to 11 for about 20 seconds, and you can hear the air getting blasted out of the system. It was the same deal with the go-kart radiator.

Only the inlet and outlet are 1/2". The core itself is much narrower tubing (maybe 1/4?), so it's not like huge air pockets have anywhere to hide. Also, the core itself is the lowest point in the system. The outflow water has to go about 3' uphill and then through a J-pipe in order to hit the sink, so once the system is purged, it will remain air-free even if the flow is shut off completely.

Joe beat me to it. I was about to say, the outlet is higher than the unit so it will always remain full after initial purging.

What's the capital expenditure amount up to?

I mean, how much money are you spending to continue "sticking it to the man"?

Haha.

Well, I should have just done this correctly the first time. (It is the cheap man who spends the most.) Cost on this unit was $250 shipped, but it ought to work.

To be fair, while this started out as a "fuck you" to the man, I've actually come to much prefer the performance of a hydronic system over the PTACs that the apartment came with. Yes, it's nice to have a $65 electric bill in January, but the bigger benefit of this is to have an apartment that is uniformly warm and comfortable, without large temperature swings and the noise of big electric heaters kicking on and off all the time.

Up and running:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1392344651

I can already tell that this unit is making more airflow, and putting out more heat, than the original hack-job. Still needs some fine-tuning of the controls, but I have an initial dataset, based on an entirely arbitrary first-guess at water flow.

Feedwater inlet temp is 122°, outflow is 98°, flowrate is 0.41 GPM, starting air temp was 59°. Fan is at high speed for this test.

1 BTU is the amount of energy exchanged when 1 lb of water changes temperature by 1°F. 1 gallon of water = 8.345 lbs.

0.41 GPM = 24.6 GPH, which is 205 lbs/hr.

I am dropping 205 lbs/hr of water by 24°F, so that's 4,920 BTU/hr.

That's well within the range I expected based on original projections (see post 165), and about half of rated capacity, which makes sense given that I am running it at slightly less than half the rated flowrate, having simply guessed at the setting based on a back-of-hand measurement of outflow.

I have increased the flowrate slightly, still well under 1 GPM. Stack temp is about 80° right now, and the bedroom has already warmed up from 58° to 64° in about an hour, and with the door wide open at that.

I do believe we have a winner here.


Meet the heat:

Your calculations tickle my nerd pickle.

I use the same UPS that you do, Joe.

Well, somebody needs to tickle your pickle, and I know you're not getting it anywhere else. :giggle:



It is a good UPS, which has served me well.

Its much smaller cousin is out in the living room powering the network rack.

If so inclined to build one, here's my suggested control system, using an Arduino or some such:

Regulate fan speed proportionally to water outlet temperature minus ambient temperature, something like over a 5-10* band.

Regulate water flow rate proportionally to target ambient temperature minus actual ambient temperature, over say a 2* band, but clip flow when water outlet minus ambient temp is more than say 12* or 15*F.

When room is warming up fan will max out and water flow will be regulated to 15*F outlet temp over ambient. When ambient is within 2* of target, water will regulate proportionally to ambient temperature, and fan will regulate to maintain the outlet temperature to minimize heat loss in the outlet water.