An anthill or a fortress? Building a house for the price of an apartment. Part 2: Heating
Part 1. Construction.
Part 3. Power supply.
Part 4. Comfort at home and gadgets.
Greetings to all readers. In the last issue I talked about the start of my construction. He told about the choice of material and preparation for the rough finish. This time I will talk about different heating systems, which system I chose and why. By tradition, for those who prefer to watch rather than read, I made a video.
First, a little theory to understand the difference between different heating systems and what to choose from. To begin with, it should be noted that there are several ways to transfer heat.
1. convection
2. infrared
In this case, the convection method involves heating the room by heating the air, and the already warm air warms all the objects. The infrared method of heating works differently: the infrared heat source heats the objects, and the objects already warm the air.
Now it is necessary to divide the methods of heat transfer into the types of devices used. If everything is more or less simple with an infrared source — it could be infrared ceiling panels or infrared film under the floor covering, then the convection method of heating has a lot of realizations. But for simplicity, I will divide them into several types: air, battery and heated floor.
1. The air type includes all types of heating, where warm air is supplied: thermal curtains, split-systems, electric fans with heating elements, etc.
2. The battery type includes convection systems, where the installation of radiators is foreseen: wall or floor. In this case, radiators can be both water and electric - this is already a matter of energy.
3. The third type is heated floors. Also called underfloor heating. They can be implemented in three ways: a warm water floor, a warm floor, heated by a spiral, or an infrared film heater.
Why did I decide to choose heated floors? Let's start to act by the method of elimination. The infrared type of heating does not tempt me because the energy carrier for such systems is electricity. That is, in the event of a power failure, the heating system will definitely fail. In addition, from physics we remember that the closer the object is to the radiator, the more heated it is. If we consider ceiling heaters, I don’t really like that my head will heat up more and my legs will get cold. Therefore, we exclude infrared heating.
Air systems are also volatile, which means that a power outage will leave the house without heating. Add to this that I love being barefoot, and the floor will still be cold. Minus!
Battery systems are the most common and fairly simple to install. But I did not want to hide the pipes in the floor, but to lead them along all the walls and put radiators under the windows and take up space is not very interesting. In addition, battery systems still do not deprive the problem of a cold floor, as the heated air naturally goes up. We exclude batteries.
There are heated or heated floors. There are three options: infrared film, heating cable and water heating. The first two options are electrically dependent, and therefore do not fit. And the last option allows you to use any source of heat, whether it is electric, gas, diesel or solid fuel boiler. That is, when the electricity is turned off, you can continue to heat the stove with wood, only it is necessary to provide energy to the circulation pump. But this can handle a simple bespereboynik. Resolved! I make a warm water floor.
For my heated water floor, I chose a pipe made of cross-linked polyethylene, but you can also use metal pipes. Someone says that metal-plastic best transfers heat, but it seems to me that there is already a matter of taste. Stages of creating a warm floor look like this:
It was in this sequence that all the steps involved in creating a heated floor in my house took place. What does this give? Firstly, I get the opportunity to use any boiler for heating, because the heat carrier is completely unimportant how it warms up. Secondly, I get a huge heat accumulator - a 9-10 cm thick screed on an area of 74 square meters - this is from 5.9 to 7.4 cubic meters of concrete. The heat capacity of 1 cubic meter of concrete is 2375 kJ / (m3 * K). It should be noted that the heat capacity of water is 4187 kJ / (m3 * K), only the heat accumulator takes up a lot of space, and the concrete just lies under your feet and is one huge battery that gives off heat for a long time, even when you turn off the heating.
Since at the moment my house has 15 kW of power, and the house has heat losses of 7.4 kW out of 100 W per 10 sq. M, I have enough power for full heating and the operation of all electrical appliances in the house. Practice has shown that the heat loss in the house is almost two times lower than calculated, which is a good result. Connecting the national wealth gas is unacceptably expensive and ranges from 400 to 500 thousand rubles. Simple mathematics shows that heating a house at the night rate will allow heating a house for 8-9 years only for the cost of connecting gas. At night, the electric boiler works with a maximum power of 12 kW, heating the room and the concrete screed, and during the day the screed slowly cools, continuing to give heat to the room. Such a cycle, the floor is heated for 1/3 days, the floor cools for 2/3 days, allows you to maintain the temperature in the house with a drop of up to 3 degrees per day. That is, if it was +25 indoors in the morning, then by night it will be +22 +23 degrees, which is also comfortable.
In addition, in case of emergency, wire breakage for a long time or a man-made disaster, a gas or solid fuel boiler can be easily connected to this heating system, which will continue to heat the floors. In the plans, hang up the gas boiler, adjust it to work from bottled gas (propane-butane) and leave it as an emergency option. A cylinder of 50 liters should be enough to heat the house for 7-10 days, depending on the temperature outside.
I chose one of the simplest boilers, but with good reviews and reliability. In essence, the boiler is a flow tank with heating elements, contactors for heating elements, and a control board for the dependence of heater operation on output temperature. Now the task was to make the boiler more intelligent and to provide the possibility of working on a schedule and / or temperature. To do this, you can take a boiler with a microcomputer, but it costs much more expensive (+ 50-100% of the cost of the boiler) or provide external control of the boiler. The heater itself allows you to install external control and has a pair of dry contacts, with the closure of which he starts to work, and when opened, turns off. That is, you need an external device that would close the contacts.
At first, I thought of a relay with a timer that would just close the relay at 23 o'clock, and open at 7 in the morning. But then it is difficult to set the dependence on temperature. In addition, I wanted to control the climate at home remotely, because I want to leave and not overpay for heating, when it is enough to maintain a temperature of 10-15 degrees in the house. So, a list of device requirements has been formed:
In all my articles, I mention that I try to use Russian-made products and look for an alternative to them only if our equipment is noticeably inferior in quality, does not meet the requirements of reliability, or inferior to the selection criteria. This time I chose a non-Russian-made boiler, but the control module was found by us - it turned out to be the Nart thermostat manufactured by Microart. The product is fresh, but from experience with their equipment (I described my experience with a solar power plant from the same company), I decided to try. For me, the device turned out to be with redundant functions. According to the manufacturer, the thermostat can control the climate in a given room with an accuracy of 0.1 degrees. At the same time, he can control fan coils, air conditioners, hoods, boilers, adjust heads on batteries or underfloor heating.
In addition, it has built-in temperature and humidity sensors, and a plug-in external temperature sensor will allow you to make weather-dependent automation. There is also a weather download from the Internet, but most of all I liked the ability to control the thermostat remotely from a smartphone.
The device itself can be mounted both on a blank wall and in a sub-socket - it is better to use flexible wires for the connection, since it is quite problematic to drown the VVGnG wire connected to the thermostat. After connecting to the power supply and Wi-Fi, the device showed the presence of a fresh firmware and I updated it. In general, judging by the frequency of updates, the potential of the device is large and the manufacturer will continue to develop the product. The thermostat has a pair of relays, which I use as follows: 1 relay switches the boiler from 23 to 7 o'clock, 2 relays turn on the heating cable of the water supply system at a temperature below -10 degrees and also only at night, since during the day running water when opening taps does not gives ice to form in the pipes. Naturally, the pipe itself is also insulated. If the topic of plumbing in a private house is interesting, then I will make a separate material about it,
So, the NUT thermostat was installed and put into operation in about an hour of time with all the wiring and settings, the application was installed on the smartphone. Interestingly, the application allows you to monitor and control several thermostats at once. True, the number of available settings via a smartphone is noticeably less than on the device itself, but this is more a question for the developers of the program and it remains open. The second thermostat I installed in the bathroom for climate control. Since the bathroom is a room with high humidity, I wanted to control the exhaust depending on the humidity in the room, since this sensor is already installed in the device. In the previous firmware this option was not available, but recently a new one came out and I have not had time to check the operation of this function. From the advantages of the device I want to mention the work of the standard 220V, that is, the thermostat does not require batteries and will not turn off suddenly, leaving all external devices unmanaged. It consumes very little, the color of the case can be chosen from 5 possible: white, milk, gray, chocolate and black. Well, climate control is possible not only from the point of view of heating, but also cooling - it will definitely come in handy in summer in southern latitudes, where people often catch cold under air conditioning after the heat outside. And by observing the cyclical nature of the temperature graph, it is possible to predict when and which mode of operation to include: cooling or heating. but also cooling - it will definitely come in handy in summer in southern latitudes, where people often catch cold under air conditioning after the heat outside. And by observing the cyclical nature of the temperature graph, it is possible to predict when and which mode of operation to include: cooling or heating. but also cooling - it will definitely come in handy in summer in southern latitudes, where people often catch cold under air conditioning after the heat outside. And by observing the cyclical nature of the temperature graph, it is possible to predict when and which mode of operation to include: cooling or heating.
Summarize. Heating with warm water floors made it possible to solve several problems at once: save on heating by an electric boiler at a nightly rate, save space by eliminating a large heat accumulator from the heating system, solve the problem of cold floor and freezing feet, remove pipes and radiators from the interior, make heating work completely silent. But the use of a thermostat allowed to get a reliable, but inexpensive boiler and control the climate in the house on a schedule and remotely. The heating system is installed, tested, started and tested. It copes with its task, which means that winter, although it is nearing, but proper heating will not allow it to freeze. Next time I will talk about electricity supply and backup power home.
Part 3. Power supply.
Part 4. Comfort at home and gadgets.
Greetings to all readers. In the last issue I talked about the start of my construction. He told about the choice of material and preparation for the rough finish. This time I will talk about different heating systems, which system I chose and why. By tradition, for those who prefer to watch rather than read, I made a video.
First, a little theory to understand the difference between different heating systems and what to choose from. To begin with, it should be noted that there are several ways to transfer heat.
1. convection
2. infrared
In this case, the convection method involves heating the room by heating the air, and the already warm air warms all the objects. The infrared method of heating works differently: the infrared heat source heats the objects, and the objects already warm the air.
Now it is necessary to divide the methods of heat transfer into the types of devices used. If everything is more or less simple with an infrared source — it could be infrared ceiling panels or infrared film under the floor covering, then the convection method of heating has a lot of realizations. But for simplicity, I will divide them into several types: air, battery and heated floor.
1. The air type includes all types of heating, where warm air is supplied: thermal curtains, split-systems, electric fans with heating elements, etc.
2. The battery type includes convection systems, where the installation of radiators is foreseen: wall or floor. In this case, radiators can be both water and electric - this is already a matter of energy.
3. The third type is heated floors. Also called underfloor heating. They can be implemented in three ways: a warm water floor, a warm floor, heated by a spiral, or an infrared film heater.
My choice is warm floor
Why did I decide to choose heated floors? Let's start to act by the method of elimination. The infrared type of heating does not tempt me because the energy carrier for such systems is electricity. That is, in the event of a power failure, the heating system will definitely fail. In addition, from physics we remember that the closer the object is to the radiator, the more heated it is. If we consider ceiling heaters, I don’t really like that my head will heat up more and my legs will get cold. Therefore, we exclude infrared heating.
Air systems are also volatile, which means that a power outage will leave the house without heating. Add to this that I love being barefoot, and the floor will still be cold. Minus!
Battery systems are the most common and fairly simple to install. But I did not want to hide the pipes in the floor, but to lead them along all the walls and put radiators under the windows and take up space is not very interesting. In addition, battery systems still do not deprive the problem of a cold floor, as the heated air naturally goes up. We exclude batteries.
There are heated or heated floors. There are three options: infrared film, heating cable and water heating. The first two options are electrically dependent, and therefore do not fit. And the last option allows you to use any source of heat, whether it is electric, gas, diesel or solid fuel boiler. That is, when the electricity is turned off, you can continue to heat the stove with wood, only it is necessary to provide energy to the circulation pump. But this can handle a simple bespereboynik. Resolved! I make a warm water floor.
Arrangement of a warm water floor
For my heated water floor, I chose a pipe made of cross-linked polyethylene, but you can also use metal pipes. Someone says that metal-plastic best transfers heat, but it seems to me that there is already a matter of taste. Stages of creating a warm floor look like this:
- Warming of the floor with folgoisol (in my case, it was possible not to warm as well, since the bottom of the SIP slab is 224mm thick polystyrene foam).
- Metal grid layout in 5 cm increments.
- The pipe layout with a segment length of not more than 84 m. The spacing between laying the pipe is 15 cm. The insulation of this pipe to the point of heating with foamed polyethylene.
- Filling the water floor pipes with a heat carrier (water or antifreeze can be used. I chose antifreeze with a temperature down to -30).
- Fill wet screed.
- Filling of the leveling layer of a bulk floor.
It was in this sequence that all the steps involved in creating a heated floor in my house took place. What does this give? Firstly, I get the opportunity to use any boiler for heating, because the heat carrier is completely unimportant how it warms up. Secondly, I get a huge heat accumulator - a 9-10 cm thick screed on an area of 74 square meters - this is from 5.9 to 7.4 cubic meters of concrete. The heat capacity of 1 cubic meter of concrete is 2375 kJ / (m3 * K). It should be noted that the heat capacity of water is 4187 kJ / (m3 * K), only the heat accumulator takes up a lot of space, and the concrete just lies under your feet and is one huge battery that gives off heat for a long time, even when you turn off the heating.
Electric heating system
Since at the moment my house has 15 kW of power, and the house has heat losses of 7.4 kW out of 100 W per 10 sq. M, I have enough power for full heating and the operation of all electrical appliances in the house. Practice has shown that the heat loss in the house is almost two times lower than calculated, which is a good result. Connecting the national wealth gas is unacceptably expensive and ranges from 400 to 500 thousand rubles. Simple mathematics shows that heating a house at the night rate will allow heating a house for 8-9 years only for the cost of connecting gas. At night, the electric boiler works with a maximum power of 12 kW, heating the room and the concrete screed, and during the day the screed slowly cools, continuing to give heat to the room. Such a cycle, the floor is heated for 1/3 days, the floor cools for 2/3 days, allows you to maintain the temperature in the house with a drop of up to 3 degrees per day. That is, if it was +25 indoors in the morning, then by night it will be +22 +23 degrees, which is also comfortable.
In addition, in case of emergency, wire breakage for a long time or a man-made disaster, a gas or solid fuel boiler can be easily connected to this heating system, which will continue to heat the floors. In the plans, hang up the gas boiler, adjust it to work from bottled gas (propane-butane) and leave it as an emergency option. A cylinder of 50 liters should be enough to heat the house for 7-10 days, depending on the temperature outside.
Electric boiler and its management
I chose one of the simplest boilers, but with good reviews and reliability. In essence, the boiler is a flow tank with heating elements, contactors for heating elements, and a control board for the dependence of heater operation on output temperature. Now the task was to make the boiler more intelligent and to provide the possibility of working on a schedule and / or temperature. To do this, you can take a boiler with a microcomputer, but it costs much more expensive (+ 50-100% of the cost of the boiler) or provide external control of the boiler. The heater itself allows you to install external control and has a pair of dry contacts, with the closure of which he starts to work, and when opened, turns off. That is, you need an external device that would close the contacts.
At first, I thought of a relay with a timer that would just close the relay at 23 o'clock, and open at 7 in the morning. But then it is difficult to set the dependence on temperature. In addition, I wanted to control the climate at home remotely, because I want to leave and not overpay for heating, when it is enough to maintain a temperature of 10-15 degrees in the house. So, a list of device requirements has been formed:
- Work on schedule (by hours, days of the week)
- Work on temperature
- Remote control
- It is very desirable to have several heating profiles (vacation, living in the house, holiday option, when we warm on weekends and do not give to freeze on weekdays)
In all my articles, I mention that I try to use Russian-made products and look for an alternative to them only if our equipment is noticeably inferior in quality, does not meet the requirements of reliability, or inferior to the selection criteria. This time I chose a non-Russian-made boiler, but the control module was found by us - it turned out to be the Nart thermostat manufactured by Microart. The product is fresh, but from experience with their equipment (I described my experience with a solar power plant from the same company), I decided to try. For me, the device turned out to be with redundant functions. According to the manufacturer, the thermostat can control the climate in a given room with an accuracy of 0.1 degrees. At the same time, he can control fan coils, air conditioners, hoods, boilers, adjust heads on batteries or underfloor heating.
In addition, it has built-in temperature and humidity sensors, and a plug-in external temperature sensor will allow you to make weather-dependent automation. There is also a weather download from the Internet, but most of all I liked the ability to control the thermostat remotely from a smartphone.
The device itself can be mounted both on a blank wall and in a sub-socket - it is better to use flexible wires for the connection, since it is quite problematic to drown the VVGnG wire connected to the thermostat. After connecting to the power supply and Wi-Fi, the device showed the presence of a fresh firmware and I updated it. In general, judging by the frequency of updates, the potential of the device is large and the manufacturer will continue to develop the product. The thermostat has a pair of relays, which I use as follows: 1 relay switches the boiler from 23 to 7 o'clock, 2 relays turn on the heating cable of the water supply system at a temperature below -10 degrees and also only at night, since during the day running water when opening taps does not gives ice to form in the pipes. Naturally, the pipe itself is also insulated. If the topic of plumbing in a private house is interesting, then I will make a separate material about it,
So, the NUT thermostat was installed and put into operation in about an hour of time with all the wiring and settings, the application was installed on the smartphone. Interestingly, the application allows you to monitor and control several thermostats at once. True, the number of available settings via a smartphone is noticeably less than on the device itself, but this is more a question for the developers of the program and it remains open. The second thermostat I installed in the bathroom for climate control. Since the bathroom is a room with high humidity, I wanted to control the exhaust depending on the humidity in the room, since this sensor is already installed in the device. In the previous firmware this option was not available, but recently a new one came out and I have not had time to check the operation of this function. From the advantages of the device I want to mention the work of the standard 220V, that is, the thermostat does not require batteries and will not turn off suddenly, leaving all external devices unmanaged. It consumes very little, the color of the case can be chosen from 5 possible: white, milk, gray, chocolate and black. Well, climate control is possible not only from the point of view of heating, but also cooling - it will definitely come in handy in summer in southern latitudes, where people often catch cold under air conditioning after the heat outside. And by observing the cyclical nature of the temperature graph, it is possible to predict when and which mode of operation to include: cooling or heating. but also cooling - it will definitely come in handy in summer in southern latitudes, where people often catch cold under air conditioning after the heat outside. And by observing the cyclical nature of the temperature graph, it is possible to predict when and which mode of operation to include: cooling or heating. but also cooling - it will definitely come in handy in summer in southern latitudes, where people often catch cold under air conditioning after the heat outside. And by observing the cyclical nature of the temperature graph, it is possible to predict when and which mode of operation to include: cooling or heating.
Conclusion
Summarize. Heating with warm water floors made it possible to solve several problems at once: save on heating by an electric boiler at a nightly rate, save space by eliminating a large heat accumulator from the heating system, solve the problem of cold floor and freezing feet, remove pipes and radiators from the interior, make heating work completely silent. But the use of a thermostat allowed to get a reliable, but inexpensive boiler and control the climate in the house on a schedule and remotely. The heating system is installed, tested, started and tested. It copes with its task, which means that winter, although it is nearing, but proper heating will not allow it to freeze. Next time I will talk about electricity supply and backup power home.