Winter heating costs, Beckett Heat Manager

[Warren]

Winter is approaching and always good to save dollars on heating. My house uses hot water baseboards. The furnace also supplies domestic hot water.

The house is four years old. It uses six heating zones, each with an independant programmable thermostat. Temperature is set to drop at night or daytime when no one is home. We install plastic shrink sheets on the windows each winter. I'd like to add extra blown in insulation to the attic to help repair some damage I've done with wiring an alarm system, as well as compensate for settling.

I'm looking for other ideas or suggestions which will help reduce costs.

Any thoughts on the Beckett Heat Manager? How realistic is the claim for a 10% savings?

Looking at the data sheet online, it seems main thing happening is to hold off firing until the supply water temperature drops to about 155F, and shut off at the normal setting about 175F. Can I get the same results merely by adjusting the thermostats on my furnace? I've had this done for a few years, and can't see how adding the Heat Manager could possibly increase efficiency.

[Pat]

Hey, if it saves 10%, buy 10 of them and you have free heat, won't you???

Go look at tankless hot water heaters to save some money.

[Tim Fischer]

OK I know that was meant to be facetious, but as a former math major this type of logic bugs me. You see it all the time, like on Leno's headlines -- the ad says "50% off, then take an ADDITIONAL 50% off..." Leno chuckles "must be free, hey what a deal!"

Wrong.

50% off of 50% off is 25% of the original, not 0%.

And 10% off 10 times in a row is about 35% of the original value, not 0%. And that's of course assuming that the effect is stackable, which of course it probably isn't.

Carry on, just being geeky...

-Tim

[m Ransley]

Start with insulation, R 60+ in the attic will make your biggest diference, forget the gimmic you are looking at and consider upgrading where you fall short, on everything.

[Pat]

I see your geekiness and raise you their absurdity. Their web site say: " it's guaranteed to reduce heating fuel consumption by at least

10%! Beckett HeatManager=99 boiler controls improve the efficiency of most gas, oil, or propane-fired residential boiler home heating systems"

So if it only improves efficiency in 'most' systems, then ....

[buffalobill]

[Paul M. Eldridge]

Hi Warren,

I have an oil-fired hot water baseboard heating system (three zones) and a SuperStor Ultra indirect hot water tank. The boiler is a SlantFin LD-30XP, equipped with a Riello 40 F5 burner and is controlled by a Tekmar, model 260.

Like the Beckett Heat Manager, the Tekmar system uses an outdoor temperature probe to automatically adjust the boiler's operating temperature for maximum efficiency and occupant comfort. But I think the biggest advantage is how it prevents the boiler from cycling on and off during times when there is no demand for space heating or domestic hot water.

My old boiler use to cycle on and off every fifteen to twenty minutes (75 to 100 times a day) to maintain its set temperature; during the spring, summer and fall when there is no heating demand, this represented a huge waste of oil -- perhaps in the order of several hundreds of litres a year. With the Tekmar, the boiler never comes on unless the hot water tank calls for heat; thus, it typically fires up only once or twice a day. The indirect hot water tank stores 30 gallons of hot water and is far more energy efficient than a standard coil or separate oil-fired tank. As an added bonus, you never have to worry about running out of hot water.

To give you a sense of the potential savings, between May 25th and September 8th, we used a total of 129.3 litres of heating oil (34.4 U.S. gallons). That works out to be just 1.22 litres per day (0.3 U.S. gallons).

Here's a picture of my Tekmar c>

[F-tank]

F-tank had written this in response to

: The Heat Manager or the perferred more sophisiticated Intellicon HW+ measure the Heat load requirements of the boiler and then using its microprocesser it adjusts the firing time of the burner to exacting cycles to ensure the boiler only has the exact amount of Hot water it needs to satisfy Heat and or Hot water, Intellicon offers a money back guarantee with a 15 year warranty, so you cant lose, but to answer your question specifically, manually changing the temp of the boiler is OK but the Intellicon in a sence changes the temp every cycle which makes it a heck of lot more efficent which is how it guarantees the 10-20% energy use reduction

------------------------------------- Warren wrote:

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