In the last part of this series, I've outlined the heating system in our newly acquired house, which had some issues: namely it was not warm enough.
As a software engineer I was trying to find the problem by modeling the components in the system, then by coming up with a theory that could be the root cause, then either prove or disprove it by doing measurements. Even if the theory is wrong, I learn something about how the stuff works. If I am right I get closer to solving the problem.
The first theory I had was about water flow. I was kind of sure that the boiler produces enough heat, but if the hot water is not flowing through the pipes in sufficient quantities our rooms will remain cold.
So I was trying to find how I can find the flow information. The answer lies in the heating manifolds:
I have one of these on all floors of the house, their role is to distribute the incoming hot water into multiple downstream pipes (under the floor heating or wall heating) and then collect them back. You can see the red one which is the hot side, and the blue one is the cold side.
As you can see, I have 8 circles in this manifold, each of which can be opened/shut using an electronic motor (driven by temperature control). The flows of the circles are shown on the cold (blue) side.
Those plastic thingies on the top of the collection side show how much water per minute is flowing though a specific circle.
There's a yellow plate in these that move up as water flows, but there are versions that move down. You will find a scale there to show the amount proportional to the movement of the plate.
The water that needs to cross is measured in litres/minute, but I have seen the use of cubic meters per hour as well.
The minimum you need depends on how much wattage you need in a room to heat it. This is typically specified in the heating designs of your house. I needed somewhere between 2-5 litres per minute. This is important as the wattage depends on how much water you pump in a room and how much degrees it cools down while in there.
If you need 2kW per hour, water cooling down 4 degrees, you will need roughly 120 liters per hour, eg 2 liters every minute. (Basic physics).
I actually had much less than that 2-5 litres (in some cases 1-1.5), especially when more rooms were heated, that was one issue that needed fixing, so at this point I decided to eventually check out the pump that drives the water flow in the pipes.
Interestingly, the flow measurements weren't entirely conclusive as one of the bathrooms was pretty warm even though it's flow was only a trickle, and I had to find out why.
So next, I decided to check out the thermostats, as I suspected their settings were customized by the previous owner. Since the house has a KNX based smart home infrastructure, to check out these adjustments I needed to set up access to the KNX bus as well as install the software needed (ETS). But more on these in the next episode.
As a software engineer I was trying to find the problem by modeling the components in the system, then by coming up with a theory that could be the root cause, then either prove or disprove it by doing measurements. Even if the theory is wrong, I learn something about how the stuff works. If I am right I get closer to solving the problem.
The first theory I had was about water flow. I was kind of sure that the boiler produces enough heat, but if the hot water is not flowing through the pipes in sufficient quantities our rooms will remain cold.
So I was trying to find how I can find the flow information. The answer lies in the heating manifolds:
I have one of these on all floors of the house, their role is to distribute the incoming hot water into multiple downstream pipes (under the floor heating or wall heating) and then collect them back. You can see the red one which is the hot side, and the blue one is the cold side.
As you can see, I have 8 circles in this manifold, each of which can be opened/shut using an electronic motor (driven by temperature control). The flows of the circles are shown on the cold (blue) side.
Those plastic thingies on the top of the collection side show how much water per minute is flowing though a specific circle.
There's a yellow plate in these that move up as water flows, but there are versions that move down. You will find a scale there to show the amount proportional to the movement of the plate.
The water that needs to cross is measured in litres/minute, but I have seen the use of cubic meters per hour as well.
The minimum you need depends on how much wattage you need in a room to heat it. This is typically specified in the heating designs of your house. I needed somewhere between 2-5 litres per minute. This is important as the wattage depends on how much water you pump in a room and how much degrees it cools down while in there.
If you need 2kW per hour, water cooling down 4 degrees, you will need roughly 120 liters per hour, eg 2 liters every minute. (Basic physics).
I actually had much less than that 2-5 litres (in some cases 1-1.5), especially when more rooms were heated, that was one issue that needed fixing, so at this point I decided to eventually check out the pump that drives the water flow in the pipes.
Interestingly, the flow measurements weren't entirely conclusive as one of the bathrooms was pretty warm even though it's flow was only a trickle, and I had to find out why.
So next, I decided to check out the thermostats, as I suspected their settings were customized by the previous owner. Since the house has a KNX based smart home infrastructure, to check out these adjustments I needed to set up access to the KNX bus as well as install the software needed (ETS). But more on these in the next episode.
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