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Lejina

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
<Bronze Donator>
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Domestic as in shower, dishes, that kind of stuff. It's not designed to be working all day long all the time.

As for heat losses, besides asking a professional for an audit, you can start by looking at your windows. Take a piece of Kleenex, a feather or whatever flies easy in the wind and look for leaks around the windows. Works better when it's windy outside. Take a look at your roof, if there's no snow up there but there's a lot on the ground, odds are your roof isn't insulated for shit.
 

mkopec

<Gold Donor>
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Its usually around the windows and doors. Also a big culprit is in the area where the floor joists sit on the basement/crawlspace foundation walls, that little area between that. And of course, depending when your house was built, they did fuck all insulating of the outside walls and attic before the 80's. Good way to see is how long the snow lasts on your roof before it melts off, if you have tons of icicles on your roof edge.
 

Eomer

Trakanon Raider
5,472
272
No, water baseboard.

How is heating my home not a domestic usage of water?
Domestic water in plumbing usage means potable water for consumption by building occupants (it comes out of a fixture for use, whether that be a faucet, hose bib, shower head, dishwasher, or clothes washer). Heating water is a separate and different usage. You can use a boiler heating plant to generate domestic hot water with a heat exchanger or indirect fired tank, that's kosher. But generally it's bad practice to use a domestic water heater, whether tanked or tankless, to generate water for heating. It's been banned in many municipalities in Canada because there was so many poorly designed, American Inventor-rigged infloor heating systems using regular domestic water heaters that were crapping out after only a couple years.

What it comes down to is that domestic water heaters are generally designed to be in use and firing 1-2 hours a day in residential applications, and to last 20 or so years with that usage. While a boiler is designed to fire pretty much continuously if need be. If you significantly raise the usage of a domestic water heater by using it for heating and have it firing 5-10 hours a day during peak heating season, the service life of that heater will be significantly reduced.
 

Mythas 5thboardnow

Silver Knight of the Realm
414
72
No, it really is retarded drivers in the south. Plain and simple. Having lived in both the north and south during winter time its night and day. Its not uncommon to have roads where I live now go almost untouched for a day or so after a decent snowfall. I have a dinky light two wheel drive mazda and I get around just fine ( using all weather tires too ). The driving lanes on that high way looked absolutely clear and devoid of snow in those pictures.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
25,471
33,229
It's not snow down here but ice. Even when it snows the humidity in the atmosphere will ice up the road. We have a guy in our shop this week from Canada installing a piece of equpment and he said he's never seen anything like it. We cleaned off some of the driveway outside and even without it raining, snowing, or sleeting the humidity iced up the plate in about 2 hours and was over a 1/4" thick. Anything elevated stays iced up even with salt and sand and there are a about 50 bridges per mile here. The guy from Canada was making fun of the forecast and the road closings before they happened. He wound up walking to work from his hotel because he said it was the craziest shit he had ever seen ice wise.

Last Friday on the way to work was the fun one. I left at 5:30am and all roads were open. Then suddenly on the interstate it started raining very hard, hard enough I thought about pulling over. The truck thermometer said 26F. Everything closed down in the next 15 minutes including the salted down overpasses and bridges. I didn't know it could really rain that hard while that cold without sleeting or snowing.
 

Deathwing

<Bronze Donator>
16,743
7,767
Domestic as in shower, dishes, that kind of stuff. It's not designed to be working all day long all the time.

As for heat losses, besides asking a professional for an audit, you can start by looking at your windows. Take a piece of Kleenex, a feather or whatever flies easy in the wind and look for leaks around the windows. Works better when it's windy outside. Take a look at your roof, if there's no snow up there but there's a lot on the ground, odds are your roof isn't insulated for shit.
Windows aren't drafty, but they do have some condensation on them on the upper floor. They are single pane. Don't think I can fix the condensation without replacing them with double pane.

Its usually around the windows and doors. Also a big culprit is in the area where the floor joists sit on the basement/crawlspace foundation walls, that little area between that. And of course, depending when your house was built, they did fuck all insulating of the outside walls and attic before the 80's. Good way to see is how long the snow lasts on your roof before it melts off, if you have tons of icicles on your roof edge.
I'll take a look at the roof snow when i get home, can't say I've noticed any icicles though. I know they reinsulated the attic very recently.

Domestic water in plumbing usage means potable water for consumption by building occupants (it comes out of a fixture for use, whether that be a faucet, hose bib, shower head, dishwasher, or clothes washer). Heating water is a separate and different usage. You can use a boiler heating plant to generate domestic hot water with a heat exchanger or indirect fired tank, that's kosher. But generally it's bad practice to use a domestic water heater, whether tanked or tankless, to generate water for heating. It's been banned in many municipalities in Canada because there was so many poorly designed, American Inventor-rigged infloor heating systems using regular domestic water heaters that were crapping out after only a couple years.

What it comes down to is that domestic water heaters are generally designed to be in use and firing 1-2 hours a day in residential applications, and to last 20 or so years with that usage. While a boiler is designed to fire pretty much continuously if need be. If you significantly raise the usage of a domestic water heater by using it for heating and have it firing 5-10 hours a day during peak heating season, the service life of that heater will be significantly reduced.
Well, if it was hacked together, they certainly did a nice job of it. I really wish I had the model number for you, but I want to say it started with an N(not Noritz). And looking at some of the pics between regular tankless and hybrid tankless, I think mine is a hybrid since they seem to be much bigger. Does that make it better suited for heating a home? I really hope the previous owners weren't idiotic enough to blow that much money on a tankless heater(installed just 2 years ago!).

Just one other thought: are there tankless heaters that are designed to heat homes? That could be what I have and it just happens to be hooked up for domestic usage too.

Found it, I think it's one of the NR models, but I'm not sure since I'm at work:

NPE Series | Navien America

IDK, the specs says NPE can do space heating and domestic. But I'm pretty clueless about this shit.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
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They just went out and measured the ice on the news here. On the I-10 bridge across the MS river on the bridge itself the ice was 2-2.5" thick and where the water ran down onto the on ramps it was right at 3". Guessing that won't melt when it warms up until the sun gets on it.

Kinda funny watching someone with crampons and an ice axe (in the south especially) just to walk across the road. She dug a hole with the ice axe then measured down. I think I'll stay in the rest of the day.

The crazy part is right before it got cold here (down into the teens) it was really warm and humid. Out in the shop the entire concrete floor and our steel plates had beads of water forming from the humidity and it was 55F.
 

Eomer

Trakanon Raider
5,472
272
Deathwing_sl said:
IDK, the specs says NPE can do space heating and domestic. But I'm pretty clueless about this shit.
I'm sure it'll work fine in the long run, tankless heaters are much better suited to heating usage than tank-style ones for a few reasons. But as a mechanical contractor, IMO it's just not good practice. That's what boilers are for.
 

Deathwing

<Bronze Donator>
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I'm less pissed about the thing being on all the time last night and more pissed that the previous owners possibly voided the warranty on my heater because they wanted to buy a cheaper model. Really hope I'm remembering wrong and I have a NPE model at home
frown.png
 

Cinge

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
7,277
2,304
This made me laugh for some reason. When I think of major snow events, I definitely do not think of 3".

A day after some three inches of snow paralyzed the country's ninth-largest city, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed blamed the resulting gridlock on decisions by schools, business and government to send people home at the same time.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
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I'll trade our 3" of ice for 3" of snow or 6" of snow for that matter.
 

lurkingdirk

AssHat Taint
<Medals Crew>
46,701
215,018
So I think it's more than just not being used to it and not having adequate clearing equipment. People in the south never learn how to drive on the snow. Why on earth would they? So imagine driving your whole life, and you never, ever, ever spin your tires. Now, try driving on snow. Your tires spin every time you start up. Every time you stop. That freaks you the heck out because it has literally NEVER happened to you before. If you're at a stop sign on a slight incline, good luck getting going, as every time you try, the tires spin, and you hit the brakes because you know the tires are not supposed to spin. Try stopping when it is icy, and you've never done it before.

Add to that the fact that they don't generally have all seasoned tires, let alone snow tires, and it only compounds the problem.

The best thing a person who is from the South can do on a snowy day is stay home and let mother nature clean things up so it is safe to drive again. Or live in the North for a spell during the winter, so they learn how to drive in snow.
 

Cybsled

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
17,092
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2-3 inches of ice is a lot, though. That stuff will not melt fast unless it gets really warm out and the ice isn't seamless (ie, holes/depressions close to the pavement). That lets water collect and "warm" water will assist in melting vs. just air (since air is a crappy conductor of heat). Direct sunlight helps, but chopping areas of the ice down to the pavement helps accelerate that since a road is going to absorb more solar heat energy then white ice. Refreeze overnight can be a bitch, though, because it can smooth out some ice and make it even more slippery.
 

Famm

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
11,041
794
Thank you Professor Cybsled of the New England academy of winter road conditions.
 

mkopec

<Gold Donor>
26,238
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2-3 inches of ice is a lot, though. That stuff will not melt fast unless it gets really warm out and the ice isn't seamless (ie, holes/depressions close to the pavement). That lets water collect and "warm" water will assist in melting vs. just air (since air is a crappy conductor of heat). Direct sunlight helps, but chopping areas of the ice down to the pavement helps accelerate that since a road is going to absorb more solar heat energy then white ice. Refreeze overnight can be a bitch, though, because it can smooth out some ice and make it even more slippery.
I know you peeps down south dont use it, but there is a reason people up north use SALT to melt ice. 1LB of ice will melt more than 40 LB of ice at 30F.
 

Eomer

Trakanon Raider
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I know you peeps down south dont use it, but there is a reason people up north use SALT to melt ice. 1LB of ice will melt more than 40 LB of ice at 30F.
Bro, do you even winter? Salt doesn't do sweet fuck all in the Real North. Then again, we generally don't have the icing problems either, because it's so goddamn cold the snow doesn't have a chance to melt and turn in to ice. Although I'm not sure hard packed snow is much better.
 

Famm

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
11,041
794
I know you peeps down south dont use it, but there is a reason people up north use SALT to melt ice. 1LB of ice will melt more than 40 LB of ice at 30F.
Cyb is from like Boston and I think our Atlanta people already said they have multiple inches thick of ice so that's going to be a hell of a lot of salt spreading trucks, which they just don't have down there in the first place.
 

Cinge

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
7,277
2,304
While tomorrow I think I will have a BBQ outside when it's supposed to be 75 ;P
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
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I know you peeps down south dont use it, but there is a reason people up north use SALT to melt ice. 1LB of ice will melt more than 40 LB of ice at 30F.
One one bridge right now they have 30+ trucks spreading salt from the salt domes (where we store strategic oil reserves), sand, and spraying glycol. They've been at it since at 7am when it got light enough for me to see them from my office. Still hasn't made a big enough dent that traffic could go up.

They brought in a semi wrecker to put at the top of the bridge to help pull the salt trucks up the ramp and lower them down the other side. The salt trucks have chains but still need help. I had to make them a beam they could anchor to the roadway with concrete anchors to hold the winch truck in place. They started with the salt and sand the day before. I guess the steepness of this bridge (it's high enough to let the 1000' ocean tanker reach the Exxon dock just upstream) isn't helping as the runoff is just running down and remelting. They ordered 3.8 million pounds of de-icer (glycol I guess) for this bridge alone according to the news.

Last week when it iced over it wasn't nearly as bad and it melted pretty good the next day once the sun got on it. The sun never got on it today and it never broke freezing and I think the temp is down to the mid teens here tonight. Pretty much all the overpasses and smaller bridges are OK but this one has I-10 shut down which makes it back up for several states in both directions.

They have a jet drier (jet engine on a trailer) they are going to pull up the bridge and follow with salt and glycol. I guess that's the next plan. I have a good view from my office window.

Bridge is over a mile long which really doesn't help much either. Just a freak perfect storm with the rain, then the hard freeze, and the humidity which is refreezing and the long elevated roadway. There's another bridge just up the river maybe a few miles that they have been able to keep open, but it's 1/2 as long and not as tall.