First, the bridge, just because it is so cool :) In another post, I will come back to this to show the rebuild of the retaining wall and new wood boiler that went in this area.
So this is what we started with when we got here... the usual electric water heater with addition of geothermal waste heat loop. Unfortunately, this turned out to be corroded and not cycling, so we were left with very high electric water heating costs.
The geothermal unit is a Water Furnace brand, a little older but a large unit and lots to work with. In the winter, we seem to use a lot of auxiliary electric heat, so someday I will have to look into the geo loops to see if all working right... but we had a few adjustments to make before going there.
First, we added an in-line, on-demand gas water heater. This was a big Noritz unit I found on Craigslist... the guy swore it worked, but when I got home I found the flow switch was shot, but a little research and a $50 part and we were back in business. This thing is a beast, probably could run a small motel on it, but I had in mind using it for radiant floor heating as well so should be plenty of capacity.
The Manabloc manifold will come in handy later for re-plumbing direct runs to shower, tub, etc for that instant-on experience. The manifold was one of the few things I didn't find on Craigslist, as Manablocs are just nice to work with.
Next came cutting into the gas line and adding a branch to feed the heater. This was the first time I did gas line work - it wasn't overly complex but was much harder work than expected to deal with the black pipe, and I won't pretend I wasn't a bit nervous about getting it right, leaks, etc. I probably ended up with 3-4 gas leak detectors all over the basement just to be sure, but in the end it all worked out pretty well. I did spend a lot of time on-line reading how this work is done, tricks plumbers use, etc, and was pretty proud of my new skill (later would use it again to add a gas line to the kitchen stove and other stuff)
After a bunch of playing around, I ran a few lines to the first floor master bathroom to try things out. Drop ceilings in the basement are a blessing. Later you will see that the location of things keeps moving as I add/extend and attempt to clean up so my wife doesn't keep telling me we will never be able to sell the house! Note that the old water heater is serving as a holding tank before the Noritz, and later this will become a key element to reducing our gas/electric demand.
Now on to my next Craigslist find, a solar water heating system that my son was nice enough to pick up in Michigan. Eventually, this got replaced with a newer setup we also found on Craigslist, but I ended up with a couple good pumps, a controller, and a bunch of other parts that will come in handy over time, and my brother got the other panels for his system. Not a bad find for $100.
Here's the start of mounting the pump setup.
Now the madness begins... stripped out the stuff I didnt need from the pump setup, added a filter as I had heard that well water could be hard on on-demand water heaters. An unexpectedly huge side project installing venting from the Noritz after finding that we had only one path available to the other side of the house as ever other spot is consumed or blocked.
Here's where I discovered the other solar water heater setup on CL, the first of several detours... you got to stay nimble when building the thrifty way. Apparently, the guy who owned these was hoping to use as a demo on his own house and start a business installing solar water heating. Unfortunately, he didn't check the bylaws and the neighbors complained and he had to take it down. So I ended up with a really nice setup for about 1/6th the cost of buying new, and did the install with my son so no labor cost... one advantage of living in the country, people are nice and rules are a little less rigid. The system came with radiators to use in your shop or house, so we decided to put in-line with our central ventilation to pre-heat the air before going to the furnace. Everything I read said to put it after the fan, but I didn't have room to work and didn't like the idea of water sitting above all the electrical components in the geo unit vs on the infeed where any leak will just spill out before the unit. Needless to say, my wife wasn't thrilled to see her husband practice his new sheetmetal-working skills untrained...
It also came with this wonderful new water heater... a lot like a traditional heater, complete with electric, but it has an inner coil that allows you to run water you've heated from the sun (or other sources, as we'll do later) through the potable water without mixing. This pre-heats the water in the tank, meaning less need for gas/electric when days are sunny. Since we live in cloudy NE Ohio, the backup Noritz & other options help... this is us changing out the water tank and a pic of the roof showing the new water heating setup... good to have south-facing roof space!
Note the dorky home-made radiators as I was worried the top of the Noritz would get super hot... after putting in use, I've found unnecessary and since removed.
One thing if you are thinking of doing this, be careful, solar heated water gets HOT! Here's a pin-hole leak as I was installing and literally the steam that is blowing out... (yes, solar electric on the other side... that's another Craigslist find and a post for another day)
Uh oh.. much to my wife's continued dismay, we discovered another good deal on a wood boiler... so 2 tons of prodding & pulling & a bit of help from the neighbor next door with his skid steer and the boiler is in place under the bridge.
Back into the basement, the new water heater tank is in place, lines run down from the roof, things are working great, just needs a bunch of cleanup.
So along the way, we decided to start my brother's place with solar water, and my parents were kind enough to pick up another manifold for his place. Unfortunately, after looking at his plumbing more closely, all his runs are pretty short and it doesn't seem worth the effort to add direct runs. Hmm... what to do... well, my princess' toes did get cold in the bathroom our first winter here... now that I have all this free hot water, some radiant floor heating surely seems a good idea. So on another free wall in the furnace room, off we go... by the way, if you haven't worked with Pex, it's the greatest, and you really don't need a lot of talent to figure it out. Saved me an unbelievable amount of cost in plumbing services as I'd never do all this myself if I had to work with copper.
So now back to the roof as I learned how heat impacted plastic... added a standard well pressure switch in-line with my pump to turn off if it senses another leak.
Time to run the boiler line from the outdoor wood boiler. This seemed like an enormous project, but after picking slowly away at it, turned out to be not too bad. A lot of physical work, and some help from my dad to get things in, but overall a good project. The special aluminum lined pex was a little pricey, but soooo worth it after I saw how easy it was to straighten out vs normal pex and maneuver through the basement.
Time to hack into the sheet metal again, to install one of the radiators the boiler came with.
Fired up and working like a charm... later I will work on a recirc system inside the boiler to make it more efficient and reclaim all that waste heat/gas going out the chimney.
So here's the system as it stands today... 5 different sources of water heat (geo, gas, electric, sun, and wood), with the benefit of instant hot water to most parts of the home and radiant floor heating in the 2 main floor bathrooms and both entries to keep our toes warm in the winter. Someday I may extend the radiant floor heating to other areas of the home but those seemed to be the most impactful... plus after all this, my wife deserves me spending some time to clean it all up & make it prettier, or at least not quite as scary to future home-owners if we decide to relocate or downsize!
All-in, I estimate we've spent about 6k on this, plus a bunch of hard work and our water heating bills have dropped to pretty much just the handling charges & taxes to keep gas running to the house. If we assume a pre-install cost of ~$100/month for water heating & handling (roughly what we were paying at our last place, here it seems close but hard to tell from prior owner records), the payback should be about 5 years - when you factor in the savings in home heating, I'm guessing we will recover our cost in 3 years, plus the added comfort, security, and knowledge we're using the sun for most of the year to limit our footprint.
(This probably isn't the end of the plumbing story... but focus is now shifting to electricity generation... )
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