Can you Heat your Shop with a $200 Water Heater? Radiant Floor Heating For My Shop | Allison Customs

well welcome back to allison customs project car tv today i'm working on the shop we're into the pull in just to fall now and it cools off pretty good at night and my shop has never had heat it is designed for in-floor radiant heat and i just have never spent the money to buy the boiler and to buy all the pumps and and really kind of learn what all i need to do to set up a system well that changes uh beginning today and that's because i got online and found uh like most of you have found youtube videos that kind of walked me through what i needed to do then i found the different calculating uh programs online to tell you what size the pumps need to be and how you calculate how many btus each circuit should be doing and um i'd had a plumber help me with routing all of my tubing in the floors so that part i had professional help and it got done this next part i could call the same guy back but i kind of looked at i was like you know i think i can figure this out and that's what we're going to do we're going to figure it out i'm not sponsored there's nothing like that this just happens to be where i found the best price with a good selection so i wasn't limited to just one or two choices in most cases i was able to choose from different manufacturers and different parts so i could pick pricing that worked for me as well as brands that i happen to know or like in my case i am trying to do this without salt without having to sweat any of the fittings because i've never done that i've watched it done i'm pretty sure that it wouldn't take me very long to figure it out but i've never done it so i don't want to just start right now while i'm trying to figure out how to lay out this whole floor on top of that i got on supply house's website and after knowing pretty much what i wanted to do and drawing a layout i ordered all my parts a couple things that i'm going to have to do to make this work is i need to build at least a little bit of wall along along the area where i'm going to be installing most of this i still have to buy my heat source which i'm going to start out with an electric hot water heater and hopefully and i know hope isn't a plan but hopefully that's going to be enough to keep this floor in the 60 degree 65 degree range by starting early it is mid oh well almost late october but we haven't we've had a few frosts but we haven't had any hard freezes yet so my hope is that by getting started early with this that hot water heater can get the floor up to temperature and then just keep it there because from what i've read and what i've watched online the hot water heater will do a great job once the floor is brought up to temperature so you just got to get ahead of it and not start when it's already minus 20 outside and then think that you're going to bring this mass of concrete in here and all of the stuff sitting on top of it up to a temperature probably in the whole winter so we're going to get started we're going to unbox all this stuff make sure we've got everything we ordered just like we do with car parts we're gonna inventory make sure everything that we ordered showed up and in good condition so when i laid out all of this on paper you don't really have a true sense of the dimensions of each item there i'm just going to lay it out on the floor to move things around real easy and then i can just measure the general size what we're going to need and then it will be expandable into the future because my plan is to add hot water solar panels looks like we got everything we ordered and what you're looking at here is uh these boxes over here on the side these are the actual pumps these bags are have the flanges for those pumps in them so that's just the representation there but this is how i drew it laid out and i think it's going to work pretty well but you can see it takes up quite a bit of area this way or i could delete these two 90s over here and put all this straight out and so we would just take all of this and stack it to the right and i just need to look and see which way i've got space for that so what i've got initially is a fitting to go from the three-quarter inch outlet on the hot water heater to one inch copper these are shark bite fittings so no soldering or sweating any of anything together we'll run a length of tubing up to the 90 the 90 over to our next fitting that goes into this first tee this tee then goes into a hose bib that we can use for draining the system then we have a ball valve and yet another hose bib and then this one would be how we fill the system then we have an air eliminator and this is designed to take the air out of the system whether it's micro bubbles or large air pockets then we have another ball valve half inch this fitting will then go to a hose that goes over to an expansion chamber and i picked up like a four and a half gallon expansion chamber threaded copper to another tee this gauge has both pressure and temperature and then we have an over pressure valve and then another fitting to go from threaded back to the shark bite and like i said these two would be could be eliminated and just continue to run this out but i bought the 290s so that we could basically bring this back under and try and compact it a little bit in the width of the whole thing another ball valve for shutting off the system and then a a t that will then go down to basically through all these fittings down to our first pump out of our first pump into manifold number one second t valve to shut off and you need a valve on each side of the pump so that you could remove the pump from the system if in case of needing a repair and then we've got uh manifold number two and a 90 here so we could bring out to manifold number three all right now i've moved you over a little bit so you can see the expansion tank that's going to go over there and that is so that as the fluid heats and cools you've got a place for that fluid to expand to so it's got pressure on one side with a diaphragm in there and then it holds just a little bit of water to allow it to receive that over pressures or under pressure so that the system doesn't try and break itself apart then on this side right here kind of imagining that we're coming back we have manifolds over here just those the manifolds that were the hot side then we have the cold side manifolds they all have one inch outlets so we're going to come from each of those manifolds into the side of these tees and 90s then that ties back in we go to a ball valve so we could shut the system off into a t with another temperature and pressure gauge and this one the pressure is probably not so important the temperature is so that we can monitor our inlet and outlet temperature to see if work anytime any kind of range that our hot water heater's going to be able to keep up with and then we may or may not need all these 90s but a 90 to go up another one to go over to the hot water heater and then another fitting from the hot water heater into our one inch copper in my case this system is going to have antifreeze in it because this is a shop and is very likely we lose power all the time but because we're heating it strictly with electricity it is very possible we could lose power for a day or two and i don't want the floor to freeze and crack so we'll be running antifreeze that will take us down to the coldest temperature we've ever seen in this area which i have a bracket here to mount that tank to the wall and i bought i just bought two sticks of copper um it's cheaper through the supplyhouse.com than it was to buy it at my local home depot or lowe's may as well get it in and with this big order shipping was free all of these are threaded so they'll all get tape and probably some pipe dope just to make sure they're not leaking and then everything that shark bite we just need to measure cut this off deburr it and plug it all together and we very well could run out of tubing here before we get done the other thing is i did not buy any straps or mounts because i just didn't know exactly how all this was going to lay out since it's my first time so that will get locally at the home depot or the loads so here's one of the pumps that i bought for my system and i bought three of the same one of my loops or one of my manifolds could have gone down one size in the pump but then that pump would have been like on its maximum all the time to try and keep up with it but it was certainly within its range but it was like at the top of its range whereas going to this pump it put it more in the middle or lower part of the range you size your pump based on basically the resistance of the fluid going through all the tubing and all of this floor and how much of that there is and how much fluid you need to move through all that tubing to get the btus out of the floor to keep the building heated it was a convoluted system there's plenty information about it online does take a little bit of digging but and then a little bit of math to get there and and i kind of kind of had a whole bunch of numbers here scribbled out and then i was looking at different brands of pumps and i ended up settling on this grun grundfos uh pump and this is the ups 26-99 fc the reason i chose this pump is versus some of the other brands that would do the same uh pressure and volume was because this is a three-speed pump so on the different circuits that are not needing quite as much pressure or not needing the flow rate i can turn the pump down which in theory should keep it cooler and therefore have a longer life span these are also like i said they end of fc which means they have an internal check valve so originally my design i was gonna have to have yet another item here which was a check valve so you couldn't have reverse flow if this pump was say not running this pump was running and it would be trying to back feed some of the fluid back into the system and you don't want that so you have a check valve on one side of the other of your pump these pumps have it built in so they were a little more expensive than the more basic pumps but only about 10 or 15 dollars each and i got the check valve which cost almost 20 dollars a piece if you do them separately and i got the variable speed and it's just selected here on the side high medium low and you can you can watch your flow rates or your temperatures to see if you need to turn up the speed or slow it down how long does that fluid need to stay in the floor to actually get the heat out of it if you're pumping it too fast you could be having your your temperature going into your floor say at 130 degrees and if you're pumping it too fast through very short loops it might be coming back at 120 degrees or 115 degrees which means your your floor is not taking the heat out of it or your floor is already at 120 degrees which i don't think we're gonna get to by being by having that ability i can adjust each pump to the circuit or to the manifold and circuits that are behind it anyway so these numbers you measure this based on what's called head loss and pressure drop and then you need to know your gallon flow per hour that can the max flow you can get through different sized tubing so all of my floors have half inch tubing in them and everything is all the manifolds are connected via one inch tubing and right now i have one end of the shop has a six circuit manifold the other in the shop has a four circuit manifold and then because i still have other stuff to add to the shop i have yet a third four circuit manifold that i can add as i'm ready to bring the system online [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's the first zone uh well the first manifold mounted and the zone pipes i think that's actually for this footing that's going around right here um if i remember right that's where that one ended up all the extra zones on here will be for this area that's dirt and the other floor where i still have the the lines that i need to bring across the dirt here and then there's these two one-inch pipes these go to the other manifold on the other end of the shop so those will go to one pump these two will go to a second pump [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay so you've seen some clips of me working on all of this behind me and i don't know how well it's going to come through on the video so i thought i'd go over it real quick we've already talked about what all the components are and basically what they're going to be for what i'm using is a hot water heater i found this one used on facebook marketplace it's a little smaller and a little lower wattage than i was kind of hoping to find but at 200 versus an 800 new one i thought well what the heck we'll give it a shot what i've got left is you can see i have some wiring that i just kind of temped together uh i don't have the covers on the motors yet because i didn't have the connectors for going into the motors so i i've made a run to electrical supply this morning got that kind of stuff i put my thermostat on the back side of this wall right here but right now i have my first two pumps which are on one zone they're wired together and then they're wired to zone one in my controller the third pump is actually not even hooked to anything yet and probably won't be for a while and then we have our our backup system here or not backup but our future expansion here if i decide i want to go ahead and put like uh overhead air blowers heat water to air exchangers that would blow water across so i tried to leave some future proofing into that systems too on the plumbing side other than that the other thing i learned is that my clamps here that are steel on copper really should all have uh black or it doesn't have to be black but should have pipe tape between them to isolate the steel from the copper and i got some of them done and then i ran out so i went while i was getting my electrical stuff i went and got some more pipe tape so i'll get these four and these two up here uh changed over and then that system won't we won't be causing corrosion so what i want to do is get this fired off start making some hot water purge the air out of the system and as we see everything's working correctly and we've got any leaks corrected then we can start pushing we'll use a small pump and we'll push antifreeze into the system and drain water out and the antifreeze is red and the water obviously clear so we'll know if we get so far but basically we've got to put 30 gallons of antifreeze in this system for an 80 gallon system to get the freeze point that i'm worried about which we get down to our coldest temperature on record is -20 and i think that was like 15 years ago but we do get some hard freezes we're just in a time right now where we've got about two more weeks of pretty mild temperatures and i'm hoping while that's the case i can go ahead and get this floor up to basic maybe 60 degree temperature so what i got going i don't know if you can hear it but i got water running in here and i have a hose hooked to the bottom of the water heater and my intent right now is just to flush this water heater out for a few minutes because i don't know that much about it it looks to be in really good shape but i don't know i i was not able to see it work or anything like that before i bought it so i'm just gonna flush some stuff out make sure there's no rust coming out the other end so now you can see i got the wiring cleaned up i secured the cables going into the pumps uh pump three i left the power wire the black wire disconnected inside the pump here and just capped it off it is hooked up here to zone two but i just won't be turning on zone two that was just my extra effort to make sure i didn't turn on this pump with nowhere for any water to flow through it plus they'll have to keep the valve off so there's not theory won't ever be any water in here until i'm ready to use it pump one and pump two come into this box and switch over to this plug and all this did was allow me an easy way to disconnect the pumps from the control so that i could use this timer and this will allow me to either i can do like four different timing situations but the one i'm interested in is while we're trying to get this floor heated up and allow this hot water heater time between uh cycles to actually heat the water i can set it to be run for say 30 minutes on 30 minutes off allowing these pumps to run because as long as that as long as the temperature in here is not up to snuff it's going to keep calling for heat and i don't want to over tax the hot water heater to the point where we're just sending cold water out right now we're feeding uh water in from the house to the system and i'm just running it into the hot water heater like i said and we're gonna flush this out for a few minutes after that we're going to uh close off the valve on the bottom of the water heater let the hot water heater fill up and once we start seeing some water come out this bottom valve over here i'll know that's full and i can open and close a couple more valves to isolate the hot water heater and let it i can go ahead and turn the power on because it is electric and let it start heating that water all right so the water heater is uh the water coming out was clear i didn't see any evidence of any rust or calcium buildup so we're gonna go ahead and hook the hose up now to our bottom drain here and that being the idea that we can uh fill the hot water heater once we start getting a little water out of that we'll know the hot water heater is actually full so basically we're now flowing water in to the hot side and we're gonna wait for it to come out the cold side over here put some pressure off we had about seven or eight pounds of pressure building up in there so just keep an eye on that once it starts running water steady we'll know this tank is essentially full okay so it's taking a few minutes but we finally have gotten all the air the best i can tell anyway out of the system and we've started water all the way down it goes out to the hose and it was running pretty clean i could hear a little bit of bubbling in here still but the pressure dropped to zero and which tells me there's really nothing building in that tank and we've gotten all the water and everything or all the air out of that system so i've shut it off i'm gonna go ahead and turn the hot water heater on let it start heating that water then we can with the hose on this valve we can force water into the system and we can fill each one of the the circuits on their own because this is both one pump one and two or one zone but we've got a bunch of loops on those two on those two pumps so we can bring water in and we'll start with pump two we'll let water through it's going to go into the hot side send water over to the manifold on the other end of the shop and then we'll open a loop and it'll it'll eventually push water and all the air back out here and into our garden hose again and we'll just keep watching that now be nice if it wasn't you know 60 feet away to where we get got to check it but that's just the way this system is gonna empty out okay so i've bled out the system on these two lines that go to the other end of the shop there's uh five loops on that end and they're all bled out uh the water was running out the hose and it finally kind of quit spitting air and if you i don't know if you can see these but there's some air valves air relief valves on these manifolds so not only do i have one for the whole system up at the top up here but i additionally have ones in the loop so i had those open so they are bled out pretty quickly actually and now what we're going to do is we obviously have three zones or three loops that aren't even hooked in and i do have one more to tie in here but we'll deal with that one in a few minutes i'm gonna go ahead and bleed this out and i just wanted to show you how i'm doing it these are made by rifing r-i-f-e-n-g um i bought three of them at the time that i bought this decided to build the system so i had two fours and then i have a six on the other end they come with the gauge with the on off valves basically everything from here to here and so far they're working very well there's no leaks over there the little bit of water you're seeing dripping here is actually coming out of the garden hose because i've got it turned off right this second so i'm going to go ahead and go back and open up um so this loop is has been purged of air this loop system which only goes to one in the floor and we'll add the second one here in a little bit i just got to clear some stuff out uh we'll go ahead and open up the bleeds and the valves that go to this manifold or feed the manifolds that was trying to push water back that way out of that system so let's get the water inbound first so i've got this line open and this opens the water's going through coming back then it goes into the garden hose here i do need to add four gallons of fluid four gallons of water to this pressure vessel here i think this thing came pre-pressurized at like 30 psi so i need to lower that so i'm going to go ahead and let some air pressure out of here and then we'll once one more time turn the water on and open this valve up so that this can uh fill up with water it's 4.4 gallons or something so only take a moment well good morning again um system is run overnight and what i noticed was the pressure in the in the circuit would uh build up to about 10 psi as the hot water heater was getting close to being fully hot you know all the way getting ready to turn off and then as the pumps would run the pressure would drop to near well all the way to zero and so i did a little more research and really this system should be a closed loop system this should run at 15 psi also was hearing a lot of of i could hear the pumps running and my experience with my pumps in the house is you never hear them i mean they've been in there for 20 years i wouldn't know if they quit working other than we'd quit having heat so i did some research on that too and these are supposed to be nearly silent to the point where you're like basically have to touch them to know they're running um and the indication there is that the pressure's dropping well you're building pressure because you're getting heat out of the hot water heater and then it's dropping to zero as the water cools and are getting noise through the pumps because there's air in the system so i let it run last night all night and just i guess hoping it would purge the air out through the different through the air valves and stuff it didn't seem to work so i'm i'm redoing the fill and purge now and what i did last time and this morning thinking about it i should have known it wasn't going to work the way i thought it would is i was pushing water in through this valve down here or up here and then i have a valve down at the bottom of the system that i was draining it out to and i was like well that's at the bottom it'll you know it'll drain it's but air is going to rise right so i was thinking this could get rid of all of the air and it just it can't handle that much air that fast the whole reason i put these two valves in was for one to fill and one to drain and i had in my head well i have this one down here that's the drain that's great if i need to drain a big chunk of the system i can use this valve down here but to get the air out of the system i needed to be using these valves so what i have going on right now is i'm pushing water in through here from the house and i'm trying to keep the pressure this this pressure valve is at like 30 psi or something so i've been trying to keep this just adjusting the valve to keep the water flow and the inlet pressure at about 20 to 25 psi then i've got this valve closed to isolate the whole system so either no water is being returned into the system it's all being returned out of this garden hose at the top so this valve is open i'm pushing water in and the and then the next trick that i figured out was to take the end of the hose and put a coil in it and put it in the bottom of a five gallon bucket then i put a brick on it so that i can see the air bubbles coming out of that hose so you know one place i read said you need about a minute of circulation of fresh water for every 100 foot of of in-floor pecs the circuit i'm working on right now has about 300 from my notes a little over 300 feet but it's also had to come in and take out any air bubbles that were left in the water heater and i was hearing this water heater quite a bit too so i think i just have a lot of air in the system from yesterday i i rushed trying to get this done well we're currently at about 20 yeah 17 minutes and 45 seconds on this first loop but again i had to get all the air out of this and i'm finally starting to see that the the air bubbles are just starting to trickle out in that top of that bucket i'm gonna let it run for another couple three minutes watch it probably get 20 minutes total on this first circuit and then i think we will purge the majority of the air out of the system so i think the other loops will go much quicker and i keep referring to circuits and loops and um i have one zone currently set up these two pumps are run on that one zone and that's because a zone is like where you would have a thermostat so these two pumps always run at the same time i got variable speed pumps so that i could control the flow to each manifold so the other manifold is just like this one and i can open and close these valves and these valves to control the flow in and out of each loop so right now i have this one loop open completely and all the other loops in the shop are shut down so we're gonna do them one by one again we'll get as soon as this loop is i'm sure the air is out of it then i'll go ahead and do this loop but i'll close these valves completely open these valves completely clear that loop then when that's done i'll close the valves to this pump isolating this whole manifold basically not really seeing any more air bubbles out there just an occasional bubble so i'm going to go ahead and close this loop off this is the inlet side or the hot side and it was flowing at max flow that's shut off i hear my pressure on my system building up we're gonna open this one [Music] so i get some water out of my overflow because the pressure came up real quick this one closed off now and this one opened all right so just went check the bucket on our second loop and the bubbles are down to very small occasionally they'll be one about a quarter or three eighths of an inch in diameter so this this loop appears to be doing what i thought and you know was we had to get a lot of air out of that first loop and out of the tank and everything else the second loop seems to be going quite a bit faster so we let the first one run for 22 minutes and we're currently at three minutes on this loop and i know again i i should have really run two loops on that last section of floor that i poured and i didn't think of it at the time i was doing it and it didn't didn't even occur to me to to not just run one long continuous loop even though i had done all the others in 300 foot loops for whatever reason it just escaped me when i was getting that floor done and i ran my loop and i just ran one long continuous when i added up it's probably about 450 feet which is way too much for half inch pecs so learn from my error slow down a little bit when you start laying stuff out and think about hey 300 feet max for for half inch pecks and my plumber said you can stretch it a little bit here and there like loop one that we were doing it does just the perimeter on this end of the building so it had to go up around you know uh maybe a hundred and twenty hundred thirty feet and then it comes back and then it and then it looped down this little sidewalk thing i have here in the middle that ties the main post together and then by the time we could do all of that we were like 320 or 330 feet i'd have to go look at my notes again we were just over the 300 but he's like that's going to be okay we're we're just barely over it it's not going to be a problem because i've gone overboard on the footage of pecks in that bay where i poured last year i'm gonna have to play with the flow rates in the manifold to that loop to see if i can ever get it to really balance out right because you basically just basically can't flow enough water through half inch pecs to heat that much mass on top of all this all of my concrete's between six and seven inches thick so it's all made to where i could park heavy equipment in here i could park motorhomes in here i could set lifts on it and never ever worry about damaging the floor but because of that i have that much more thermal mass i have to heat the other loops i had guidance and i had somebody here making sure i was doing it right when i did it and uh those are all you know gonna be balanced pretty well we have some that are 240 feet i think was the shortest and then the biggest is about 320 feet so those are gonna be pretty easy to balance with just my you know small changes to the flow rates on these manifolds got the whole system purged out and started up again and it seems to be working much better it's much quieter so the water inlet and outlet temperatures are are more controllable which is telling me there's less air in the system uh and i've got the system up to about 15 psi so as the water heater gets up to temperature which is now set at 125 the pressure builds a little bit due to the heat it uh it stays right in that 15 to about 18 psi range the whole time first the timer it has a feature that i wasn't even aware of when i bought it i was buying it because it would allow me to have the timer go kick on for 30 minutes off for 30 minutes or any any number i wanted on five and off for an hour it doesn't matter but it has a temperature probe in it and i was just playing with that well as i come to find out i could set an on and off temperature if i just plug the pumps or hardwired the pump straight into the system would it would call for the pumps to run constantly because it's constantly calling for heat and what that does it depletes the hot water heater so quickly that you're basically pumping cold water through the floor you're never giving the hot water heater a chance to build temperature so what this timer was going to allow me to do when i originally thought about it was i was going to basically eliminate the thermostat system until i got the floor up to temperature and i was just going to run the pumps off of the timer through extension cord and everything would would you know eventually get to temperature and by allowing the hot water heater to have 30 minutes without the pumps running i would keep cycling that that temperature in there and and always have warm water going to the floor first the pumps could not run for 30 minutes without depleting the hot water heater completely and running cold water anyway so i'd already started trying to figure out whether i needed 25 minutes or 20 minutes and it looked like it was going to need to be about 20 minutes and then let the hot water heater run for about 40 minutes to get back up to temperature and and even then it wouldn't shut itself off that it's reached 135 degrees when i had it set that way it was just going to be getting close and then the pumps were going to kick back on and essentially suck it out again i got to playing with this switch and it's a kt 3100 kt 3100 temperature controller it has four timing functions and it has a temperature function the temperature function allows me to hook up this probe and i just put it on the outlet the hot side pipe when this pipe and i've played with different temperatures and what i've come up to is when this pipe hits 28 degrees celsius which is about 82 degrees fahrenheit pumps will kick on the pumps will run until this pipe comes down to a temperature of 22 degrees celsius which this is one issue with it is it's only in celsius it doesn't have a fahrenheit but 22 celsius is 72 degrees so it's going to kick on at about 82 degrees and run until the temperature in at the pipe here is down to 72 degrees and it's going to allow that cycle which is going to keep the hot water heater running the whole time but it shuts the pumps off long enough for the hot water heater to have a chance to keep up and what i've been noticing is it runs uh the pumps run for about 15 to 18 minutes it's it's been a little longer as the as the day has warmed up and then they shut off and they're off for about 15 minutes while the temperature comes back up so it just finished the cycle a few minutes ago we're back up to 23.4 degrees c and we're looking for 28 degrees and so it's running about 50 of the time the pumps are running with the hot water heater which is the same goal as i had with 30 and 30 minutes on a timer but now it's temperature controlled so i'm not depleting all of the heat out of this tank and you know now we're going to let it run for a couple three days before we're gonna be able to get and it may take more than three or four days before we're gonna get the temperature in this building to come up but right now we've got the thermostat set at 70 degrees and i don't think we're gonna get to 70. i'll be shocked if we could get to 70 at all but it sets a barrier and if it does get there it'll shut off and we won't be just burning electricity for no reason so that's the system that's what i've come up with i hope i've answered everybody's questions on how the system is put together and why i chose what i did if you have any questions put them in the comments i will say this now please like and subscribe it really helps the channel and i love to get feedback via your comments and everything so please let me know what you think what you want to know if you think i should have done it a different way um the issues i have out here is i don't have fresh water source out here and i don't have natural gas or and no desire to have a propane tank out here so my choices are to heat the place electrically solar or my eventual goal waste oil boiler so we'll we'll leave at that as to why i've chosen to do things the way i have but please like and subscribe hit the bell for notifications all the youtube stuff before i'm done with this video i'm going to come back one more time in a few days to a week and let you know how the system is working have a great day welcome back it's been nine days since the last part of the video in that time i've been gone most of it i did get to play with the system a little bit for tweaking uh about three or four days in and then again today and what i've found is the floor is running right around the 62 63 degrees fahrenheit right where i had it set and the building is in the you know low 60s degrees radiating off that floor i had tweaked the system a little bit you know the basics are you play with the inlet and outlet flow rates to try and balance all the loops and i've just been doing that with a infrared thermometer gun here and just if i have loops that are returning much warmer water than other loops then i've been slowing their flow to get that water drawn out and into the floor so additionally today i pushed antifreeze into the system so right now with the amount of antifreeze i was able to push in the tester strips say that i'm good down to about minus 18 degrees so that's that's plenty i'm not too worried about that and one of the tweaks i made at the three day in setting was to modify the hot water heater i'm going to tell you right now as a disclaimer don't do it if uh if you try it you're at your own risk you're you're playing with some with a pressure vessel and heating water and all kinds of other things that can become catastrophic but i'm going to tell you what i did not but i'm not going to give you instruction on how i did it a little back story to this is the way an electric hot water heater works is the top element runs when the temperature drops below a certain level in the hot water heater the top element turns on and heats approximately the top third of the water in the tank and the idea is that if you were using this in a domestic setting is then when you turn on your hot water you know faucet you get some instant hot water even though you might only have about a third of the tank heated you're going to have some hot water at that faucet pretty quickly but the way these tanks work is that top third heats and when it's when that amount of water is warm then the system switches over to the bottom element and allows that element to run to heat the bottom two thirds of the of the one because of that i would draw out all my hot water in about six minutes and then the system would have to shut down for the better part of an hour so that the water could heat back up and do it again while six minutes out of every hour is never gonna heat this place so what i did was rewire my hot water heater so that both elements run all the time or anytime that their water is not at the minimum temperature both elements run so with the 4 500 watt elements running together my outlet temperature on my pipe not not actual water temperature but on the outside of the pipe as close as i could measure was running about 26 degrees celsius which is an equivalent of about 79 degrees fahrenheit and so that's roughly the water temperature i'm sending out to the floor and if i watched my gauges on the different manifolds that was pretty close i was sending about 80 degree water to the floor per the manifold thermostats 79 degrees per the switch or this yeah this timer switch that's fine that got the temperature up to roughly 60 degrees on the floor the building was comfortable enough with a light jacket i could get some work done today since i was playing with the hot water heater anyway and pushing antifreeze into the system i decided to go down to home depot buy to 5500 watt elements and swap those out so what's happened by swapping over the 5500 watt elements my average temperature is running at about 29 and a half degrees celsius which is equal to about 85 degrees fahrenheit i gained six degrees in my constant running temperature which means to maintain that same 60 degree floor temperature i should in theory have to run the system less time to maintain that that's what we'll we're hoping for i mean the system's been running here for a little while but i pushed in the antifreeze just a couple hours ago so it's basically having to heat all that antifreeze up and everything else but it's been consistently six degrees warmer sending water out to the floor now if all that works correctly this system should run for less time each evening and into the morning and cycle more to you know cycle on and off uh more so that i am in fact using less electricity even though i'm drawing instead of 9 000 kilowatts per hour i'll be drawing 11 000 kilowatts per hour but if the whole system runs for a shorter period of time because warmer water is making it to the floor then i've achieved my end goal okay so all that said that's how my system is set up i hope all of this helps anybody else trying to do this it was frustrating for me to try and find information on the internet to tell me how to do this and that's because professionals want to protect their job i would guess but there is information out there it is available there are some great sites all those sites all that information a list of everything i've used in my setup will be in the description below by the way if it's an amazon link it is an associate link so i do make a little bit of money off of those and that's just something i've got to just you know have a disclaimer about every time i do that any other links are just links to other sites or other people doing maybe home setups or professional sites trying to sell you stuff so shop around i'm not saying amazon will be the best price on anything just a chance to find the parts that i used all that that's what i got for you i hope this helps please like subscribe hit the bell for notifications if you have questions put them in the comments if you have ideas that would maybe help my system work more efficiently i'm all for it let's share that information we'll see you again next time [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Allison Customs' - PROJECT CAR TV

Views: 360,746

Keywords: shop, garage, heating, radiant, floor, hydronic heating, hydronic, hot water, solar, radiant floor, heat, shop heater, hot rods, car, truck, workshop, workshop heater, electric heater, natural gas heater, waste oil heater, boiler, gas boiler, Hydronic heat, Radiant heating, Radiant shop heat, Radiant infloor, Radiant in floor heat, How to, Hot water heat, Heat pump, Water heater

Id: mQX_Qh_qLG0

Length: 46min 0sec (2760 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 26 2021