When you’re in the heart of the heating season (October 1st through May 31st) and your boiler’s running anyway to heat the building, it’s an absolute no-brainer to use the Lindy coil and make all your hot water. This is arguably the most practical and cost-effective way to produce all the hot water for your building during the heating season.
However, when you’re outside the heating season, the economics of running your boiler to make hot water through the Lindy coil become much less attractive and it may be worthwhile considering an alternate hot water heater solution. For example, say you’re in the middle of summer with 150HP steam boiler (6,000,000 Btu/hr) firing up to provide a peak 40GPM hot water load (roughly 2,000,000 Btu/hr) in the mornings and evenings when everyone’s taking their showers or baths. Because you’re outside the heating season, the boiler’s controls are essentially bypassed to an aquastat which measures the boiler water temperature. This aquastat will turn the burner on and off several dozen times each day in order to maintain the boiler water above a certain temperature needed to provide instantaneous hot water. So the burner kicks on to heat up several hundred gallons of boiler water, simply to heat a few dozen gallons of domestic hot water… not terribly efficient.
Imagine an alternate system setup where you install 1 or 2 high efficiency hot water heaters burning Natural Gas to produce your domestic hot water in the summer months. Now that behemoth boiler can take a rest for a few months while the 90%+ efficient hot water heaters chug along and produce exactly the right amount of hot water for your building and turn off when hot water is no longer needed.
This configuration provides some much-needed breathing room for a PLANNED shutdown of your boiler. Now you have the luxury of scheduling a few days in the summer to take your boiler offline for a much needed fireside cleaning, waterside cleaning, burner overhaul, etc. without ANY interruption to domestic hot water!
This setup will also provide critical redundancy of domestic hot water production. If for some reason your boiler goes offline in the middle of January, you can now use the gas-fired water heaters to provide hot water to your residents instead of being completely out of both heat and hot water.
The Metro Group, Inc. is proud to offer full life-cycle support for all your boiler room needs. Call your Account Manager today if you need to schedule a fireside or waterside cleaning, arrange for a burner overhaul, install a replacement Lindy coil, or if you’d like provide 100% domestic hot water uptime to your residents.
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