The problem is heat sources inside the house. If it's 25-30C outside and someone's had a shower, you're roasting a joint in the oven, and the kids are using their 600W gaming PCs, that's heat input and nowhere for it to go.
Plus solar gain (windows etc) can be a problem, even if you're well insulated.
Theo
Electrostatic air cleaner. Can be fitted to the side of your HVAC equipment in the basement. Some will also have a humidifier added to the furnace to set the RH in heating season. Takes a 1/4" line to the cold water, to fill the reservoir for it automatically. When I bought the house here, one of the first things I did was turn off the humidifier (then when the furnace was replaced, no humidifier at all was fitted to the replacement).
Heating a home quickly... goes against the mantra of efficiency. The salesman today will try to sell an undersized heating system. For a person like yourself, simply buy the next size up. If the salesman wants to sell 100,000 BTU, tell him to install a 120,000 BTU unit. That will give "toe warming capability".
I can make it uncomfortably warm here, if there's a reason, but that's just a waste of natural gas. With the old 80,000 BTU furnace, I could make you uncomfortable in about
20 minutes.You can have any furnace you want, if you have the ducting for it. If the ducting is pathetic (say, a series of 3" diameter pipes for some reason), then you cannot run a lot of BTUs and you'll be sucking your paws for heat. Bad ducting is the single biggest reason for not being able to fix stuff on these systems. The upstairs was cold on the home I was born in, and we actually retrofitted a couple additional registers. One was added to the back porch, and you could dry winter clothing on a drying rack above the vent. A register was added to the upstairs stairwell and hallway. These were possible because some walls needed to be opened up, and ducting could be added. Another register was added to the other side of the house, and that one could be done because there was a duct pipe to extend to operate it.
*******There is also an operational alternative, where the call-for-heat and call-for-cool alternate, and this is done as a way to "force" the humidity. It's an energy waster, but if you want a particular humidity, there are controllers for these systems that will do the programming for you. And control both the temp and the percent humidity. Here, in my zone on the map, there is little call for this, maybe early fall or late spring might call for operation that way. Other times of the year, straight heating operation or straight cooling, is enough. I couldn't be bothered adding that to the system I've got.
It's not practical to air condition below about 70F or so, There's a risk of freezing up the A-coil in the furnace stack, which isn't good for it. If the RH is 60% in fall, the air temp is 72F, there's no "runtime" on AC to dry out the air. The alternate programming solves that, by heating the house up to maybe 76F, then air conditioning it for a while (dries the air), heat it up again to 76F, cool it down again, and eventually the RH is 50% which is good enough. While this is going on, the RH outside the house is 90% and the air there is unusable as a fix. (Opening a window would not help in fall.)
*******If you tried to retrofit ducting in your radiator homes, you would reach the wrong conclusions about hot-air systems. They work just fine... if the ducts are designed into the house structure, and if the person doing the design work, actually cares about a result. There is a lot of slipshod work, where you're standing on a ladder looking at something and going "what were they thinking". Some of the ducting looks "designed", but there is always a bit that looks like "bodged". Like it wasn't on the plans and someone penciled it in at the last moment.
Paul
Entirely like living on Mars, if what we read about Portland is anything to go by.
If its 25-30C outside and you're roasting a joint in the oven, and the kids are using their 600W gaming PCs, you have a greater problem than air conditioning or lack of it.
Not if you draw the heavily insulated curtains.
Umm. I sold a barn for part Q planning housing development. Architect included air source heating (possibly to influence the planners). Part way through the project he was informed it would require a new local
11kV transformer as there was insufficient power available from the existing mains.Rapid re-design to gas CH!
I haven't built a PC with that small a power supply for years.
Plus 100-120W per person :-)
And the increase in dust was correlated with an increase in Asthma.
In message <rn84sf$178l$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>, Paul snipped-for-privacy@needed.invalid writes
It's just coming up 35 years since we swapped the tepid air for radiators (and 31 years since we sold the place), so I can't give you figures, but IIRC, the ducting would have been something like 8" x 6", and I haven't a clue what the output of the heating unit was. The gas boiler that replaced it (physically a similar size) was a vast improvement.
Adrian
On 27 Oct 2020, Paul wrote
The house that I remember having an oil tank was bought by my parents in Ottawa in 1956-57, when I was 4 or 5 years old. It was a new build, purchased off-plan. (I remember seeing photographs of my parents visiting the site when the basement had been poured, but was still an open hole in the ground.)
We lived there for about 10 years, when we moved a few streets away in the same suburb. I can't say for certain, but I don't recall the second house having a tank for fuel oil, so it may have been converted to natural gas by then.
As for inside/outside, I wonder if there was a climate thing going on. Wouldn't an outdoor tank in a Canadian (or northern US midwest states) winter need some sort of insulation to keep the fuel oil from turning into treacle?
Alternatively, it may have been indoors simply because the builders could easily put it there when the basement of the house was still open; they then wouldn't need to insulate the thing.
Getting the tank into the basement after the house had been built could have been a bit tricky.)
That's the second person who's mentioned that particularly nasty failure mode!
That and that a lot of them were electric...
Thanks for all the replies.
Andy
But it takes a Tory government to spend tens of billions with nothing to show for it. (Track and trace anyone?)
And a Labour government to quadruple the NHS budget between 2001 and
2010 (without having a *clear* plan of what was needed), including spending tens of billions on a (doomed to become) failed computer system... And two illegal wars that have cost far, far more and are going to continue to cost us for the indefinate future with extra security and restrictions.
An electric whole house system is going to cost an arm and a leg to run?
That would not be allowed in the UK, because upstairs windows have to be openable and allow 'means of escape'.
This specifies a minimum aperture size, including minimum width and height so the people can get out and a burly fireperson wearing breathing aperatus can climb in.
Builders of 60's and early 70's houses loved those floor to ceiling 'picture windows' made of cheap timber with single glazing. And before the 1973 gulf war oil and electricity was cheap, while town gas was never used for heating (much).
We had town gas when I installed my CH system in the late 60s. There must have been quite a lot of boilers using it since 'conversion to natural' kits were easily available.
Economy 7 and plenty of insulation helps. When this heating was commonplace, off-peak electric was cheap.
On 28 Oct 2020, Andrew wrote
Economy 7 was an interesting exercise, as the idea made sense -- heat the storage heaters cheaply overnight, and let them passively release the heat during the day.
My sister-in-law had it installed, and discovered the classic problem with it: she was out of her house from about 0730 to 1730 (commuter), so the place was warm when she wasn't there, and getting colder by the time she got home.
Good value if you were retired and at home during the day; if your house was empty for most of the day, not so good.
<snip>
I can't say I have much faith in either of them.
Boris is a journalist with an education in the classics. His health minister is an economist. The leader of the opposition is a lawyer. None of them have a scientific education. It's no wonder we're in such a mess.
Andy
Even then, Economy 7 was still more expensive than gas.
These electric systems were cheaper to install in a new house than wet central heating. The only reason they were fitted. Unless there was no gas supply. And not that many new estates were built with no gas.
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