I think about how many hands must have touched these things before they came to me, how many jobs they helped size, and how many problems they helped solve. Think of all the time they saved — and not one of them needed a battery.

Maintaining good morale is another winter challenge. Jobs may come to a standstill, or move at a snail’s pace due to weather. Yet, paychecks and business must continue forward. 

While it’s true geothermal heat pumps do offer excellent opportunities in combination with low-temperature hydronic distribution systems, they are not the only viable way to combine the heat-leveraging ability of heat pumps with the unsurpassed comfort offered by modern hydronic distribution systems.

Little kids aren’t the only ones who think like this. People not of this trade often think in a different way than we do. And, sometimes, they even think in a better way.

Long before Americans had access to natural gas, propane, fuel oil, or electricity, and long before there were automatically controlled central heating systems, wood was the most commonly used heating fuel.

My daughter Erin, along with her three sisters, grew up listening to me talk nonstop about hydronic heating. Erin recently bought a house with a furnace.

My objective is not to dissuade you from designing around 20° delta T at design load. It’s to assure you the sun will come up tomorrow if you happen to pick a different value.

I was having a conversation the other day with Ara Marcus Daniels, author of many plumbing books, who is quite dead. I do such things because I have time on my hands and not much of a life.

The combined cost of hydronic radiant panel heating, along with a separate central cooling system, often strains the construction budget to a point where something has to go, and that something is usually the radiant heating option. It gets trumped by a lower-cost forced-air system that delivers both heating and cooling, albeit often at reduced comfort.

Since heat travels on flow like a passenger on a train, where there is no flow, there is no heat. And it’s going to look just like an air problem. Which it’s not.