I followed the thread of comments over on the old post and I can't keep track of all the comments over there.
From Conrad:
I just bought a house built in the 1920’s with radiant heat run off an oil boiler. Any reason I couldn’t retrofit such a system to run in the manner MMM is talking about? I would love to get rid of my oil tank, my boiler and the costs associated with maintaining them every year.
An answer, you potentially can convert it to the MMM method.
There are some things that would really effect this:
- I just converted an oil boiler to natural gas, while dangerous dealing with gas it can be done by a DIYer with great care.
- You need to figure out what type of system you have. A system that old might be gravity fed. If this is the case you will need to start talking to someone who knows about those systems.
- For my setup I had a copper fined baseboard radiators. These start working at a temperature about 140 degrees so I had to use a natural gas boiler rather than a high efficiency gas water heater that max out around 180 degrees. If you have cast iron it can potentially be heated by the a high efficiency water heater
- Your first step before you do anything else is to calculate your heat loss. Go over to Heating Help on the wall for help with this.
If your radiators can provide enough heat with the 140 degree max then you will likely be OK. I'm happy to help through the wall if you like. [/list]
