We’ve had the heating guys here this past week working on installing a new heating system. The bad news is we had to go with base-board hot water (a.k.a hydronic heating system), which is costing 50% more than we had budgeted for. The good news is that it is a much superior system for this climate (as opposed to the forced hot air system). Also, there are a couple of benefits to it — 1. We will get zones for the first and second floor, and two the water heater is part of the system, and this baby can put out 175 gallons/hr @ 140 degrees.

There are some downsides too, it is more expensive, and it covers the base board on many walls. We are also going to be left with inactive registers in the floor where the forced hot air ducts used to be. However, I think those can be dressed up and left alone.

You may be asking why we were forced to go with the hydronic system, and the reason is, in a 115 year old house there aren’t a lot of places where duct work can be seamlessly integrated into the house (or for that matter in such a way that is not completely apparent). The hydronic system uses 3/4″ pipe and they are much easier to conceal and you only need two to go to the second floor for instance (feed and return), where as duct work would need a duct per room.

On the first floor all of the electrical outlets were located in the base board. They were also old (very old) — it was the old braided wire (knob and tube style) with no grounds. I had been planning on redoing the wiring, but I was only going to replace the wire. All that changed with the base board heat. I had to put in new outlet boxes, wire, everything, and while I was at it I added quite a few new outlets. For instance, the dining room only had 2 outlets it now has four; the living room had five outlets it now has nine.

One thing I learned from all this is they built some sturdy houses back then — it is a nightmare trying to drill through the wood, it [the wood] is extremely hard.

The base boards needed to be pulled off of the walls where the heat was going. That job proved to be a little too hard for me; I didn’t have the right tools and just wasn’t confident in how I was approaching it. Harry came over and took care of most of it while I was in Evansville. He left some of his tools, and once I saw how he did it, it wasn’t too hard to get the hang of it.

The heating guys worked for part of last week; they will back this week; and then again in a couple of weeks. This time of year is a busy time for them and they didn’t have a lot of consecutive days on the schedule. What made it worse is that they were down 2 guys (out of five) so they were a bit overwhelmed last week. Also, since we have heat we aren’t as much of a priority as those who are without heat.

I did make sure they did the 3rd floor first (where my office is). It is nice to finally have heat up there. We used a stand alone unit for it instead of trying to figure out how to get base board hot water all the way up there.

I hope to have pictures in the next couple of weeks …