Background

Chris is a resident of Lino Lakes, Minnesota, who spent his career as a boiler technician. He began working on boilers first in the US Navy and later at such luminary Minnesota companies as Northwest Airlines, Medtronic, the Hamm’s and Schmidt Breweries, HB Fuller, and more.

In 1991, Chris purchased a house with no heat in the basement. He used his boiler expertise to outfit his home with a hot water heating system featuring a Burnham cast iron boiler.

Challenge

The boiler is now thirty years old but still works well. Chris has divided the house into six heating zones with a pump large enough to service all six. Most of the house is heated by the large zone in the basement because the home features a large open stairwell.

Chris has always run his system with water as the heat exchange fluid, but he wanted to add a layer of freeze protection as well. He has a career’s worth of experience with glycol, both propylene and ethylene.

Solution

As luck would have it, Chris’ good friend Paul works for SVL, Inc., the exclusive distributor for Hydromx in the upper Midwest. In 2018, Paul purchased a house with in-floor heating and knew from his work about the benefits of Hydromx. After Paul installed Hydromx in his heating system, he had some leftover and offered it to Chris.

“I had heard that this was new cutting-edge stuff,” Chris says, “but I figured it was just glycol.”

Chris purged the water from his fluid loop, measured it, and replaced it with a 50/50 mix of water and Hydromx.

Results

Chris points out that his system isn’t “smart”; it has no advanced controls or sensors, just regular thermostats and switches. “But I know how long it takes to heat up the big zone in the basement,” he says, “usually about a half hour or maybe 40 minutes.”

After starting up the system for the first time on Hydromx, “I walked away, came back about 10 minutes later, and the boiler was off and at high limit,” Chris says. “It cut the time it took to heat that thermal fluid by 60%. That was impressive.”

As the heating season continued, Chris’ boiler was able to satisfy space heating loads so quickly, it began to short-cycle. To maintain maximum efficiency, he reduced the boiler’s firing rate by removing two of the five burners. Now the boiler is more accurately matched to its speedy heat exchange rate.

“I can’t give you numbers, so I’m not exactly sure about savings,” Chris says. “It runs far more efficiently than it did before.” From a lifelong boiler technician, that’s high praise.