Depth of water sensing 1

[alternety]

I would like to monitor the water depth in well. Maximum depth is 500" and minimum is 0'.

I have been thinking pressure sensor but everything I have found is quite expensive packaged sensors.

Any ideas on other ways to monitor depth or sources of something I can use for a sensor in a 500' well.

 

[Warpspeed]

Great info alternety, I shiver just thinking about ice and snow. Here in Australia, direct solar gain in summer is the problem, not winter heating. It is MUCH easier and cheaper to deal with.

What do you suggest for kitchen ventilation in a very cold climate ? Cooking smells and high humidity require exhausting fairly large volumes of precious warm air. Would a rotary heat exchanger heat recovery system for the kitchen be worth consideration ? Ditto for the laundry and bathroom ?

 

[itsmoked]

Thanks to alternety. I will consider these things.

The existing furnace I condemned 5 years ago or so for fear of monoxide was one of those stewpid floor registers that actually sucked in the at the floor on either side of a central wall and exhausted out the wall with a big vane that could direct most heat to one or the other side, all gravity stuff. It used 17,500BTU of gas. I suspect it was perhaps 50% efficient. Truly dreadful, causing massive unpleasant stratification. Like standing head temperatures of 110F, sitting head temps of 70F, and feet at 45F. At any-rate, I will be blocking this off and removing what I can. I will re-sheet rock the wall [both sides] and try to match the plaster. I will patch the floor.

I have tentatively selected a new Goodman furnace:

http://www.goodmanmfg.com/consumer/

GCV90704CXA
69,000BTU Full input
64,200BTU Full output
48,000BTU Half input
45,000BTU Half output
21" x 28" x 40"
135 pounds
93% AFLU

It is a two stage. I have done the full energy calc and came up with 51kBTU, which seems about right. I kinda laugh because finding a 50kBTU is like finding "the corner" while standing in a sphere.

I believe I will only need the first stage most of the time except for those rare 20F evenings. This will allow a long even cooking without short cycling.

Twill be mounted in the attic horizontally. I will run 6 registers. The return and furnace will be centrally mounted above where the condemned furnace is under the house.

I will saw off the existing flue pipe that comes up the wall that the condemned heater is in under and where it exits the ceiling in the attic. I will drop a black iron pipe down the old flue pipe from the roof. It will be braced and mounted under the house and in the attic. I will run the condensate drain from the new condensing furnace down the same old flue chase. Then I will foam the top and bottom of the chase.

I'll run a sweeping 90 return from the hallway ceiling return register into the furnace thru an electrostatic filter. The hot air plenum will of course have the six different register ducts leaving it for all rooms to be heated.

Question: Does anyone know anything about 2 stage heat/cool thermostats or have any recommendations?

 

[alternety]

The laundry room should not get particularly humid if you use a washer and dryer. Give the dryer outside air for input and combustion if it is gas. Dump the output outside through a vent pipe. Seal both pipes when not in use. The home depot grade little flapper dampers are quite useless.

The rotary heat exchanger you are talking about is probably an "energy" recovery unit rather than a "heat" recovery unit. The energy unit recovers humidity as well as heat. It also usually will exchange some actual air with the input stream. If you are trying to get rid of humidity you want the heat recovery one.

I have all the rooms serviced by air that is supplied by a heat recovery unit. The bathrooms have a switch that lets you turn on/speed up the fan for a preset period.

The kitchen is a special case and a difficult one. I am very sensitive to cooking emmisions. One wiff of smoke from frying or something and my sinuses bang shut. In past houses I have used up to a 1200cfm residential range hood. Did not fix the problem. This time I have a commercial hood made by Captive Aire. 1200cfm exhaust and 1200cfm make-up air. The incomming air enters from a grill on the top front of the hood and more grill that is behind and below the level of the stove. It basically surrounds the cooking area with an air curtain. I have built in a water coil in the blower unit that supplies the outside air. Some people have said I need to heat the air - others say no. Putting the coil in after installation would be a real horror so I did it when I put it all together. It uses a pump that senses the coil temperature. I don't have to turn it in if the wife does not want it running. It is a significant heat load.

You should not use a heat recovery unit for a range hood. It will get gummed up.

 

[alternety]

itsmoked.

I just responded and it took my IE instances down and lost the post. Here I go again.

You mention black pipe. I am guessing for gas but if not -Black pipe is not a normal flue material. Check codes before using that. Plastic is normal for a condensing furnace but you need to see the vendor documentation which is lacking on Goodmans site. The condensate is corrosive and needs plastic. It also has to have a trap to keep exhaust gasses out of the house. Be careful. There is also a flexable stainless gas pipe available. Again check local codes. It won't crack in an earthquake like iron will. That is what I used. It is also easier to run.

Are you thinking about doing this yourself?

I have seen those furnaces for sale on the internet. An alternative. Small boiler (they are quite compact and some can be wall hung) in the space where you have the old furnace or you hot water heater. Use the boiler and an indirect DHW storage tank and you will significantly improve your DHW efficiency. Run some baseboard tube and fin or buy some attractive old radiators. You could also do fan and coil units in various places. Probably more expensive but you could do it with plumbing tools instead of sheet metal knee deep in fiberglass. Radiant would be quieter. All that stuff in the attic will lose heat and probably add new air leaks. When the heater is not running, cold air may descend from the vents.

 

[itsmoked]

alternety; Thanks for the comments. I hate when the post chokes... My biggest cause is sometimes I go up the post to copy a posters name. Something goes wrong and I end up going to that posters specs.. The answer I am working on, of course, vanishes.. AArgh! If my posts get much longer than two sentences I start copying them and pasting them on top of each other in word pad. Then if something goes wrong I just copy the wordpad back to the post.

Naw black iron pipe is just normal code speak for non-galvanized steel water pipe. Not supposed to use galvanized in gas service.

Several people have suggested that I run baseboard water heat. But we are crammed into our little bitty house and finding functional baseboard heat space would be difficult and problematic. While I constantly think about running cogen; a water cooled, NG fired generator, used as a water heater with "waste" electricity, I think about having to crawl around under the house insulating pipes that actually have a much higher delta to insulate against than the ducts in the attic.

I will use the existing roof jack to vent the new furnace using pvc.


I must mull the attic heat loss problem..

 

[itsmoked]

Well now I am considering baseboard water heating... I looked at each room and yes they all have resonable places to place "radiators"?

Are they only convection driven on the air side?

What does the piping consist of?

How is it insulated?

Is more than one required in a room?

What is the typical water temp?

 

[alternety]

The only packaged co-gen unit I have seen on the market is expensive beyond any reason and I seem to remember they did something I considered dumb (other than pricing).

There are flat panel radiators.

Here is a bit of an out-of-the-box idea. Radiant heet does not care about gravity.

I will assume that since you have lathe and plaster walls you also have that in the ceiling. So we won't go for the attic. This also keeps you out of the fiberglass. This has merit.

Take PEX (the tubing used for heating by anyone paying attention) and some aluminium sheets designed to hold the tubes. You can work out your own approach to the spreader plates or buy them ready to use. Do some furring strips and put this on the ceiling. Attach drywall to the furring strips. The plates should contact the drywall but it may not be absolutly essential. Maybe throw on some mud just before applying the drywall and squeeze out the excess while screwing on the drywall. This needs some experimentation to make sure you can make non-lumpy ceilings. Dump a bunch more insulation in the attic. The ceiling is now much hotter (not dangerously so) and attic insulation is a good thing in any event and relatively cheap. If you could start from scratch I would spray some foam to seal everything. I would put up a vapor barrier before the heating stuff.

Just a thought.

 

[alternety]

We cross posted. This happens when I spend a day or two finishing a post.

If you use baseboard or stand-alone radiators there is a major convection component. The slantfin url is oriented to baseboard radiators. That is what they make. These are done by the foot. Radiant floors, walls,ceilings are an area phenomenon.

I have not used it, but play with the Slantfin software and see waht it says. Essentially the house is divided into zones and a thermostat controls each zone. A boiler supplies water to the zones. It runs when anything calls for heat. Zone valves (there are other approaches) send hot water to the zone based on the thermostat. A buffer tank helps with small zones causing short cycling but is not generally required. Many successful system do not use this approach. Water temp is a function of heat loss and the amount of heat exchanger in the zone. You want to stay with low temps to insure condensing in the boiler.

If you do DHW the temp will be high in that loop and you may not condense; but it will still better that a regular hot water heater.

I live to confuse with alternatives.

 

[nbucska]

Please anyone:
What is the connection of the heating and the well water
depth monitor ?



<nbucska@pcperipherals DOT com> subj: eng-tips
read FAQ240-1032

 

[Warpspeed]

Probably none directly, but it is still part of the same project and of interest to some people here.

If the significant drift off topic annoys you, just untick the e-mail notification.

 

[alternety]

There has been a morphing of subject, as explained previously by another poster. As I have also explained, I restarted this thread with a redirection of the topic to get to the people who have set a "notify me" on this thread. If the site would allow me to edit previous posts I would have noted this in the first post - but it does not.

Is there some relevant reason for your posts and reference to the FAQ? If you read this post in its entirety you will follow the flow. If you do not; how could you respond to any of it?

 

[nbucska]

Alternety:
The FAQ notice is intended for everyone. 90% of the
FORUM's correspondance is advisors trying to find
out the requirements.

<nbucska@pcperipherals DOT com> subj: eng-tips
read FAQ240-1032

 

[alternety]

We were going to put in the antifreeze today. Canceled on account of noise. I have been having real problems with the noise level of the variable speed pump. I walked around the house and you can hear it in all the rooms on both floors. Now drywall will affect this, but even so. In the hallway outside the boiler room (which is already an enclosed wall) it just reverberates. The contractor is going to talk to Grundfos. It is just way too noisy.

I opened up the case on the pump and my guess about what was inside was verified. It is a simple speed control using what appears to be a triac to run the capacitor start motor. This may be the source for at least some of the noise/vibration particularly at lower speeds.

I don't know where to find another pump if this design is simply intrinsically noisy.

 

[itsmoked]

That may be a problem.. A VFD solution is rough too. They make horrendous noise for in a home.. Both audio and EFI. I know, I run one under the house.

 

[Warpspeed]

A capacitor start motor must be just about the worst possible type of motor to try to control the speed with. Below full running speed the centrifugal start switch will connect in the start winding and start capacitor. When up to full running speed the start winding is mechanically disconnected. These types of motors are only usually used where massive staring torque is required, certainly not for centrifugal pumps !!

Induction motors also operate from the rotating magnetic field generated by the stator windings. Reducing the voltage without also reducing the frequency is not a very nice way to reduce speed.

Triacs can also have strange characteristics when operating with highly inductive loads. They can spuriously maintain full conduction (not turning off). I am not surprised it is noisy, the induction motor and triac have probably become mortal enemies. I guess what you can hear is the battle raging through the pipework.

The most suitable type of motor for speed control with a triac is the universal ac/dc brush type series motor as used in most power tools and household appliances. If you can change either just the motor, or find a pump with such a motor, it will run smoothly and energy efficiently at any set Rpm right down to almost zero.

 

[itsmoked]

alternety; Are sure you're not hearing air/cavitation noises.

Most of those Grundfos's are pretty darn quiet. I have two buddies running those on their hot water loops with no detectable noise.

 

[Warpspeed]

It may work quite well at full speed and voltage. My guess is that at reduced voltage the triac is having fits with the inductive load. Triacs sometimes don't always turn off at the zero crossing if current is still flowing.

Try looking at the motor voltage and see if it is rock steady, or jumping around all over the place at low pump speed.

 

[alternety]

I think I mis-spoke about the capacitor. It is for run not start.

I have several other smaller Grundfos pumps in the system. They are indeed very quiet.

The pump and motor are integrated. Can not replace the motor with something else.

I have found 3 units on the web. All look like they do exactly the same thing. They use their regular motor with a triac. None of them actually provide any data on what they do, but the pictures all have the same sort of motor and there is always the big capacitor if they show and inside picture.

 

[VEBill]

(joke)

NEWS - NASA announces that they've cancelled the entire Manned Space Program so that the engineering and science staff can be reassigned to work on a higher priority project - Alternety's new heating system.

;-)

 

[itsmoked]

Hey alternety. I talked to a guy about your circ-pump noise.

He said two things.

One was that most of those circmotors come with multiple speed settings like 5 leads, each one faster and faster. He said the best way to control the head is to stage the pump. One zone calling; speed 1, 3 zones; speed 2, etc. You may not need the highest setting ever.

The second point is; noise he has had to service, has ALWAYS been the relief valves WITHOUT EXCEPTION. They can make horrendous amounts of strange/referred noise. So make absolutely sure that isn't it.