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I’d love to have the collected wisdom of you all on this heating/cooling
system I just saw.
There’s an oil fired hot water boiler, and each zone goes to a heat
exchanger unit that blows air through the hot water coils in the unit, and
then this air is used to heat the house. There’s a heat exchanger unit
in the basement to handle the first floor, and one in the attic to handle
the second floor. So in the living space of the house it’s a forced-air
system, but the heat in the air was transferred from a FHW system.
I think these units also cool the air (somehow) to give central air
conditioning. The heat exchanger units were manufactured by First Co.
in Dallas Texas and they have a website (that only works with IE browser)
at www.firstco.com
To me it seems like there is an awful lot of mechanical stuff in this
system. How reliable are systems like this? How expensive to run?
Thanks much for any input.
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I am thinking of a system like this for when I replace my systems in a couple of years.
One of advantages of this kind of system is ZONING. And it allows for easily combining energy from several sources such as gas, solar, and/or heat pumps.
*As Bill points out, it is easy to zone hot water - small cheap valves are available. You certainly could have motorized air valves in a duct work run. But nobody does. Also, you need to heat some water in all house (domestic hot water for showers and such). So it is resonable to upsize the water heating function rather than adding another combustion device (such as a forced air furnace).My unmetered city water comes in at 38F. So I could do summer-time A/C for free with such a system. Except, of course, I never need A/C here. -David