Rapidly rising energy prices, EU CO2 emissions fees and more and more unpredictable weather make us look for savings everywhere. We insulate the walls, replace the windows, seal the attic. We invest in modern boilers or heat pumps, believing that this is the end of possibilities.
And that’s not true.
Huge savings lie in what you already have – in your heating system. No expensive repairs or wall forging. Some governments in the EU (e.g. in Germany) have long understood this potential, introducing subsidies, but also the obligations of system regulation. Although they do it sometimes strange – such as the order to balancing buildings with min. 6 apartments. Do those with five supposedly waste energy differently? Let’s leave politics. Let’s focus on physics.
What exactly is hydraulic balancing?
I live in Germany and I will use the local definitions, but take it easy – physics does not change the passport at the border. Simply put: it is such a regulation of the installation that it can reach every room Exactly the amount of energy that is necessary there and exactly when it is needed.
Sounds logical? Why is about 70% of installations in Germany and over 80% in Poland not sustainable?
The water is lazy
Most of us react only when the room is ‘cold as in a kennel’. Then the installer arrives, he will add a stronger pump and … after the problem, right? Well, no.
Imagine installing what. Hot water flows through pipes to the radiators. This road is a labyrinth: bends, tees, risers. Water, like everything in nature, is lazy. Why should he run at the end of the corridor, if he can ‘turn’ into the first radiator he meets and happily return to the boiler?
Someone will say: ‘But for me the second and third heater are also warm!’. Yes, because the water, apart from being lazy, also does not like crowds. He chooses the lesser evil – some will go on, but slower and reluctant. Before it reaches the last rooms, it will lose its ‘enthusiasm’ to give up energy. It rolls through the radiator, barely warming its top, and tired, it returns to the boiler room.
The ‘Whole Hot Heater’ trap
This is where ‘YouTub Engineers’ come on stage with a shout: ‘Hurra! My heaters are all hot after all!’.
And my blood is flooding. Is it a hobby? The task of the radiator It’s not hot. Its task is to provide the right amount of heat to the room. Whether it is half-original or whole is due to precise calculations, and not what we think ‘touch’.
In the next part, I will tell you how installers (often wrongly) try to deal with balancing and what are the methods of setting settings.
The continuation will follow.