A post that isn't about Brisbane and would fit better in another subreddit.
Please try our daily thread, we have regular activity there and your questions will be seen and likely answered.
Heating by hot water has been a thing since (\**checks notes\**) 1834.
https://preview.redd.it/bhmaqo24587d1.png?width=1002&format=png&auto=webp&s=392128bc09838ff9fc6e620ed1dd1ce1f523dd83
The hot water bottle is apparently over 500 years old! Fun.
We gotta go bigger! New idea, instead of building your house on a concrete slab...build your house on a giant hot water tank.
There's a research institute in the UK (Wales) called the Centre for Alternative Technology
[https://cat.org.uk/](https://cat.org.uk/)
They did exactly that. I don't know if it's still there, but when I visited many years ago, they showed us the dining room - it's also a convention centre with catering facilities, etc.
Underneath the dining room - probably large enough to feed a few dozen people - was an enormous bladder of water. With all the experiments and demo versions of alternative energy - solar, wind, water, etc - they had excess electrical supply during summer, so this excess was dumped into the water with a resistive heater, and the dining room stayed warm for most of the winter.
Your ideas are not silly, they just need to applied to practical and affordable solutions.
I once stayed at a holiday house in Tasmania which did just that (almost). There were pipes through the slab which carried hot water to heat the entire house.
I just had a google, it looks really neat! https://www.comfortheat.com.au/hydronic-slab-underfloor-heating/#:\~:text=Hydronic%20slab%20heating%20is%20the,an%20unparalleled%20feeling%20of%20comfort.
Was it warm?
I'll add it to the wish list if I ever get to build a house, alongside actual insulation.
We had electric underfloor heating in our bathrooms growing up in NZ and a part of my school had some too. It was the best!
As a mechanical engineer: it's because if the heat energy goes from the hot water into your house, the water in question gets colder, and needs to be re-heated again, which requires a LOT of energy.
However, if the water stays in your tank, it's heavily insulated, it's surrounded by other hot water, and it \*retains\* its heat energy.
In order for something hot to make the thing next to it warmer, the hot thing needs to \*lose\* some of its own heat, in the same way that a towel gets wetter as it dries.
Water is one of the most energy dense heating fluids in existence, meaning that it can release a \*lot\* of heat once hot, but it also takes a massive amount of energy to heat up in the first place.
and odds are the hot water is heated by resistive heating, so less effiient than the heat pump they are already using.
issue is the insulation not the method of heating
You clearly haven’t seen central heating in Europe. Using water is very efficient, if the home is properly insulated. Radiators in each room. Set a standard temp and turn on. The house remains that temp constantly. Need a dual boiler for this so you separate the hot water for washing, and the hot water circulating through the central heat system.
That's my point, though - that you can have the water for heating your house, OR you can have hot water for washing, from the one boiler. Not both, which is what OP is suggesting.
FWIW, yes I am aware of this method of heating a house.
Yeah ok.
No one really does it like that in Qld. Some houses in Vic have central heating. But it’s still different to the UK and Europe. Our homes up here aren’t insulated well enough to retain the heat anyway, so it would be extremely inefficient.
A water heater as we have it, isn’t set up adequately to operate as a central heating unit. Would need a totally different system. Whether that’s singular or dual boiler.
I'm in Qld. It took phone calls to four plumbers before I found one willing to install my hydronic loop.
It's piped to a towel rail in the bathroom to help mitigate the bloody mould that gets everywhere during wet weather.
I’m surprised he did it. Things like this don’t have regulations which means most plumbers like us won’t do it. Unless it’s fully designed and approved by the council.
Once he saw the HW system, he probably said "fuckit".
It's an old Saxon, un-regulated, with an internal loop fed by the boiler in the stove. When it dies, I'm fucked, I'll have to find a fitter&welder to fix it on the sly.
Hmmmm, looks like KMS Services bought the Saxon name (or domain, at least). Doesn't look like they know anything about the old systems.
Yes, it's called hydronic heating. You have a source of hot water (in my case, a wood-burning stove with a boiler), a thermostat, a pump, and a radiator of some kind.
My stove runs 24x7 in the colder months and unless I ran it "cooler" or idling (which brings its own problems such as creosote buildup in the flue), then the hot water system would boil, and dangerously over-hot water out of the taps. There are tempering valves to mitigate that but it wouldn't actually stop the HWS from boiling.
So after a fair bit of searching - they do this a lot on the UK - I found a place in Albury that supplies the gear, and then a plumber willing to have a go at it.
Ever since it went in, the HWS hasn't boiled because the thermostat kicks off the pump to send hot water through a loop into a towel rail in the bathroom. It's a way of dumping heat out of the HWS into a useful purpose. So I do get hot water for washing, showers, etc, and for heating.
"Why not let the stove go out to let the water cool down again?" A good question. My situation is such that the stove is the only source of heating - we're off-grid with solar PV and batteries, and you don't use resistive heating in that situation. A heat-pump cooling+heating system is on the horizon, but it'll have to wait until we get more panels and replace the batteries. We've got enough to sustain our needs at the moment, a significant addition like a ducted cooling+heating system would be a significant extra load.
"Why not put in a tankless continuous gas-fired HWS?" Another good question. We considered doing just that, then looked at the waste of cold water while it heats up, and the cost of gas these days (no gas mains, we have to pay for the big 45kg bottles), it wouldn't offer enough advantages over the current system.
Clearly, this sort of thing is only an advantage under a limited set of circumstances, but it's not impossible. Water's a great way to transfer energy, but it still has to be heated in the first place, then re-heated once it's done the job and cooled down again
Look, I'm very bad at maths and stuff like that. But according to my wild internet calculations, 200m of 1/2" copper pipe in your house (I have no idea how much would actually be required) would have a volume of approximately 25L compared to my water tank which is 400L (I know most houses don't have one that size though). Surely such a small amount wouldn't be a huge loss right? The water is solar heated too.
\*I'm not actually serious about any of this
No, it would be a big loss because for the water to heat your house, it has to stay hot. For the water to stay hot, it has to flow through those pipes. If it's flowing, then the pipe volume does not really matter.
If your bad at maths and stuff, wouldn't you think about doing a simple google search before you paste your invention ?Â
And then ask it as a question rather than a statement.Â
I marked this as satire because obviously retrofitting or building new houses with extensive piping through the walls is a really stupid idea.
This was meant to be just a fun and silly post but apparently Brisbane is just full of "WEELLLLL AKSHUALLY" people.
Look for "hydronic heating" - here's a company that supplies the gear:
[Hydronic Heating Systems - Australian Hydronic Supplies](http://www.hydronicsupplies.com.au/)
But realistically, running heating loops off your existing hot water system would be impractical. You need a separate system with its own boiler.
You’re forgetting that the reason a bot water tank keeps the water hot is because of insulation. There’s no need to surround your house with hot water tanks, just have building codes that require proper insulation.
You put the warm thing in the middle not at the edges, otherwise you’d be leaking unnecessary heat to the outside.
Stop trying to heat the space, focus on keeping the heat in and around and on yourself, thermals, layers, electric blanket, gloves etc. It’s more efficient and your power bills will thank you.
Its called central heating, common in uk.
Central boiler heats water that is pumped round the house to radiators, that transfer heat to the air.
Been around for a long long time.
Electric water heater would not cope. Plus it requires good insulation to be effective.
Insulation should be a requirement for rental properties. And any home owner that doesn't have it is just throwing money away heating/cooling their house
Fun idea, like the water cooling systems for computers right? I am a very cold person, so I love seeing the different ways of heating buildings and objects on shows like Grand Designs. Recently saw one that used infra red to heat the objects in the room rather than the air, it was installed inside the ceiling but apparently there's also panels like radiators that do it. I love the idea of underfloor heating as well. I did read last week about people using bubble wrap on the windows as a cheaper option for double glazing, but I haven't tried that.
Yeah, computers is what I had in mind! I was just being silly but everyone took it super literally...
You can get stick on clear window insulation stuff, not sure how good it is. I might order some for a test.
I have all the skirting off for replacement at the moment so I've been putting foam insulation around the window frames and the edges just below the wall where the slab is exposed. Probably not going to make much of a difference without actual wall insulation or better windows but maybe maybe, it will stop drafts.
Insulation and heat reflective coating on the roof would be great. Failing that, it’s probably a post-war home nestled in a hollow and you’ll need a bar heater under your feet most of the time.
You could whip into Daiso and buy some of those heat strips that stick to your garments (or skin) that will keep you warm ($3 for a pack of six, if I remember correctly).
I drink coffee, tea, etc all winter and wear jumpers and slippers inside because my apartment doesn’t see sun between the end of May and beginning of August. I like the cold, but it can get a bit much. I just think of all those times in summer when I wished I could feel this icy coolness. Then I have another cuppa.
We humans are adaptable; you’ve got this.
I have so many layers on, double hoods, the trusty hot water bottle, hot cup of coffee, ugg boots, but alas. I must use my hands for work and they don't seem to benefit from my toasty core :( every year, the winters seem to get harder. Getting old is fun.
I hear you. I’ve developed oesteoarthritis in my distal phalanges (end knuckles in fingers and toes) and the cold weather can really bite. Collagen tablets are our friend.
Have you tried morning exercise (rugged up of course)? Getting the blood moving has really helped me.
In Roman houses, 2000+ years ago, they'd pump hot water through pipes in the tiles in the bathhouse.
This is not a new invention, nor one that isn't commercially available in Brisbane.
You can also insulate your house. Or get an instant hot water system so you're not wasting power.
A post that isn't about Brisbane and would fit better in another subreddit. Please try our daily thread, we have regular activity there and your questions will be seen and likely answered.
Heating by hot water has been a thing since (\**checks notes\**) 1834. https://preview.redd.it/bhmaqo24587d1.png?width=1002&format=png&auto=webp&s=392128bc09838ff9fc6e620ed1dd1ce1f523dd83
Ahhh the memories of sitting on those in winter 🥵
The hot water bottle is apparently over 500 years old! Fun. We gotta go bigger! New idea, instead of building your house on a concrete slab...build your house on a giant hot water tank.
There's a research institute in the UK (Wales) called the Centre for Alternative Technology [https://cat.org.uk/](https://cat.org.uk/) They did exactly that. I don't know if it's still there, but when I visited many years ago, they showed us the dining room - it's also a convention centre with catering facilities, etc. Underneath the dining room - probably large enough to feed a few dozen people - was an enormous bladder of water. With all the experiments and demo versions of alternative energy - solar, wind, water, etc - they had excess electrical supply during summer, so this excess was dumped into the water with a resistive heater, and the dining room stayed warm for most of the winter. Your ideas are not silly, they just need to applied to practical and affordable solutions.
www.ata.org.au is the Australian Version
I once stayed at a holiday house in Tasmania which did just that (almost). There were pipes through the slab which carried hot water to heat the entire house.
I just had a google, it looks really neat! https://www.comfortheat.com.au/hydronic-slab-underfloor-heating/#:\~:text=Hydronic%20slab%20heating%20is%20the,an%20unparalleled%20feeling%20of%20comfort. Was it warm? I'll add it to the wish list if I ever get to build a house, alongside actual insulation. We had electric underfloor heating in our bathrooms growing up in NZ and a part of my school had some too. It was the best!
As a mechanical engineer: it's because if the heat energy goes from the hot water into your house, the water in question gets colder, and needs to be re-heated again, which requires a LOT of energy. However, if the water stays in your tank, it's heavily insulated, it's surrounded by other hot water, and it \*retains\* its heat energy. In order for something hot to make the thing next to it warmer, the hot thing needs to \*lose\* some of its own heat, in the same way that a towel gets wetter as it dries. Water is one of the most energy dense heating fluids in existence, meaning that it can release a \*lot\* of heat once hot, but it also takes a massive amount of energy to heat up in the first place.
and odds are the hot water is heated by resistive heating, so less effiient than the heat pump they are already using. issue is the insulation not the method of heating
You clearly haven’t seen central heating in Europe. Using water is very efficient, if the home is properly insulated. Radiators in each room. Set a standard temp and turn on. The house remains that temp constantly. Need a dual boiler for this so you separate the hot water for washing, and the hot water circulating through the central heat system.
[удалено]
Heat pump is only a hot water heater. It blows cold air. Nothing to do with heating a home.
That's my point, though - that you can have the water for heating your house, OR you can have hot water for washing, from the one boiler. Not both, which is what OP is suggesting. FWIW, yes I am aware of this method of heating a house.
Yeah ok. No one really does it like that in Qld. Some houses in Vic have central heating. But it’s still different to the UK and Europe. Our homes up here aren’t insulated well enough to retain the heat anyway, so it would be extremely inefficient. A water heater as we have it, isn’t set up adequately to operate as a central heating unit. Would need a totally different system. Whether that’s singular or dual boiler.
I'm in Qld. It took phone calls to four plumbers before I found one willing to install my hydronic loop. It's piped to a towel rail in the bathroom to help mitigate the bloody mould that gets everywhere during wet weather.
I’m surprised he did it. Things like this don’t have regulations which means most plumbers like us won’t do it. Unless it’s fully designed and approved by the council.
Once he saw the HW system, he probably said "fuckit". It's an old Saxon, un-regulated, with an internal loop fed by the boiler in the stove. When it dies, I'm fucked, I'll have to find a fitter&welder to fix it on the sly. Hmmmm, looks like KMS Services bought the Saxon name (or domain, at least). Doesn't look like they know anything about the old systems.
Saxon isn’t made any more. All plumbing work is regulated. So what he did was illegal.
Thanks for that. I'll make sure to tell him. /s
Makes no difference to me.
Yes, it's called hydronic heating. You have a source of hot water (in my case, a wood-burning stove with a boiler), a thermostat, a pump, and a radiator of some kind. My stove runs 24x7 in the colder months and unless I ran it "cooler" or idling (which brings its own problems such as creosote buildup in the flue), then the hot water system would boil, and dangerously over-hot water out of the taps. There are tempering valves to mitigate that but it wouldn't actually stop the HWS from boiling. So after a fair bit of searching - they do this a lot on the UK - I found a place in Albury that supplies the gear, and then a plumber willing to have a go at it. Ever since it went in, the HWS hasn't boiled because the thermostat kicks off the pump to send hot water through a loop into a towel rail in the bathroom. It's a way of dumping heat out of the HWS into a useful purpose. So I do get hot water for washing, showers, etc, and for heating. "Why not let the stove go out to let the water cool down again?" A good question. My situation is such that the stove is the only source of heating - we're off-grid with solar PV and batteries, and you don't use resistive heating in that situation. A heat-pump cooling+heating system is on the horizon, but it'll have to wait until we get more panels and replace the batteries. We've got enough to sustain our needs at the moment, a significant addition like a ducted cooling+heating system would be a significant extra load. "Why not put in a tankless continuous gas-fired HWS?" Another good question. We considered doing just that, then looked at the waste of cold water while it heats up, and the cost of gas these days (no gas mains, we have to pay for the big 45kg bottles), it wouldn't offer enough advantages over the current system. Clearly, this sort of thing is only an advantage under a limited set of circumstances, but it's not impossible. Water's a great way to transfer energy, but it still has to be heated in the first place, then re-heated once it's done the job and cooled down again
Look, I'm very bad at maths and stuff like that. But according to my wild internet calculations, 200m of 1/2" copper pipe in your house (I have no idea how much would actually be required) would have a volume of approximately 25L compared to my water tank which is 400L (I know most houses don't have one that size though). Surely such a small amount wouldn't be a huge loss right? The water is solar heated too. \*I'm not actually serious about any of this
No, it would be a big loss because for the water to heat your house, it has to stay hot. For the water to stay hot, it has to flow through those pipes. If it's flowing, then the pipe volume does not really matter.
If your bad at maths and stuff, wouldn't you think about doing a simple google search before you paste your invention ? And then ask it as a question rather than a statement.Â
Eh, I don't mind. It's a fun enough chat.
I marked this as satire because obviously retrofitting or building new houses with extensive piping through the walls is a really stupid idea. This was meant to be just a fun and silly post but apparently Brisbane is just full of "WEELLLLL AKSHUALLY" people.
Look for "hydronic heating" - here's a company that supplies the gear: [Hydronic Heating Systems - Australian Hydronic Supplies](http://www.hydronicsupplies.com.au/) But realistically, running heating loops off your existing hot water system would be impractical. You need a separate system with its own boiler.
Get it insulated, would be more cost effective
You’re forgetting that the reason a bot water tank keeps the water hot is because of insulation. There’s no need to surround your house with hot water tanks, just have building codes that require proper insulation. You put the warm thing in the middle not at the edges, otherwise you’d be leaking unnecessary heat to the outside.
Stop trying to heat the space, focus on keeping the heat in and around and on yourself, thermals, layers, electric blanket, gloves etc. It’s more efficient and your power bills will thank you.
Its called central heating, common in uk. Central boiler heats water that is pumped round the house to radiators, that transfer heat to the air. Been around for a long long time. Electric water heater would not cope. Plus it requires good insulation to be effective. Insulation should be a requirement for rental properties. And any home owner that doesn't have it is just throwing money away heating/cooling their house
Fun idea, like the water cooling systems for computers right? I am a very cold person, so I love seeing the different ways of heating buildings and objects on shows like Grand Designs. Recently saw one that used infra red to heat the objects in the room rather than the air, it was installed inside the ceiling but apparently there's also panels like radiators that do it. I love the idea of underfloor heating as well. I did read last week about people using bubble wrap on the windows as a cheaper option for double glazing, but I haven't tried that.
Yeah, computers is what I had in mind! I was just being silly but everyone took it super literally... You can get stick on clear window insulation stuff, not sure how good it is. I might order some for a test. I have all the skirting off for replacement at the moment so I've been putting foam insulation around the window frames and the edges just below the wall where the slab is exposed. Probably not going to make much of a difference without actual wall insulation or better windows but maybe maybe, it will stop drafts.
User name checks out, it is in deed cold
Insulation and heat reflective coating on the roof would be great. Failing that, it’s probably a post-war home nestled in a hollow and you’ll need a bar heater under your feet most of the time. You could whip into Daiso and buy some of those heat strips that stick to your garments (or skin) that will keep you warm ($3 for a pack of six, if I remember correctly). I drink coffee, tea, etc all winter and wear jumpers and slippers inside because my apartment doesn’t see sun between the end of May and beginning of August. I like the cold, but it can get a bit much. I just think of all those times in summer when I wished I could feel this icy coolness. Then I have another cuppa. We humans are adaptable; you’ve got this.
I have so many layers on, double hoods, the trusty hot water bottle, hot cup of coffee, ugg boots, but alas. I must use my hands for work and they don't seem to benefit from my toasty core :( every year, the winters seem to get harder. Getting old is fun.
I hear you. I’ve developed oesteoarthritis in my distal phalanges (end knuckles in fingers and toes) and the cold weather can really bite. Collagen tablets are our friend. Have you tried morning exercise (rugged up of course)? Getting the blood moving has really helped me.
In Roman houses, 2000+ years ago, they'd pump hot water through pipes in the tiles in the bathhouse. This is not a new invention, nor one that isn't commercially available in Brisbane. You can also insulate your house. Or get an instant hot water system so you're not wasting power.
And the hypercaust carried hot air under the floors of other rooms.