I worked for a manufacturers’ rep when I was first learning about hydronics. A guy I worked with was 15 years older than me. He knew that I had absolutely no training as an engineer so he took a different tack with my education.

A young guy who was about the size of Bruno Mars came to my seminar once, and we were chatting during a break. I asked him how long he had been in the business. It’s good to see young people getting involved.

For decades, changing out a thermostat for a retrofit hydronic heating system was a simple task for a service technician. From Bangor, Maine, to Breckenridge, Colorado, the mere two, 18-gauge thermostat wires running through a home was not a concern (short of the random nail or mouse taking one of the two out).

With systems dating back into the 1800s, hydronic heating has been around a long time. As with many technologies, a modern hydronic heating system bears little resemblance to one based on the earliest design techniques and hardware.

Troubleshooting hydronic systems can be challenging, as the pipes are hidden behind walls. Your imagination has to help you “see” the routing of the piping. 

Have you ever had one of those times when you’re trying to figure out some problem and then suddenly the solution comes to you as if by magic? 

The measure of a heat pump’s heating performance is called coefficient of performance (COP). It’s the ratio of useful heat output divided by required energy input, where both the output and input are expressed in the same physical units.

I was wondering about boiler chemicals and how many contractors (if any) were using them on brand-new systems. Do we need them?