When Jason Ridgeway of Ridgeway Home Services, West Chicago, Ill., says he takes pride in his work because “we like what we do,” it’s pretty evident in his installations. Recently, at a new construction custom house in the trendy Wrigleyville neighborhood, the homeowner asked for a hydronic snowmelt system and hydronic floor heating.
The nearly complete radiant and snowmelt installation in Wrigleyville.
Ridgeway installed REHAU under floor metal plates with 1/2″ REHAU o2 barrier pipe. This allowed for the added floor radiant and even heat distribution with out adding to the floor height. The 2-man crew also added a 80-gallon indirect hot water heater and even snowmelt to the project in the front and back porch areas as well as walkways. Ridgeway custom built a hydronic panel to tie this all in.
Since this was a new construction site, the electrician had not been there to install power. “We had to get this up and running in order to heat floors so the flooring contractor could put down his floor which he would not do without floor heat running even though the furnaces have the place heated to 75 degrees. The electrical wires in the pictures are just temped in to a outlet until Sparky finishes,” says Ridgeway.
Ridgeway has a purge set up on the panel so they can purge all radiant floors from one location. “This entire system is filled with glycol so we want to switch hoses as little as possible,” says Ridgeway.
A Ridgeway radiant selfie: Ridgeway, right, and his tech, Mario, take time to show off their work.
Some of the challenges were that the mechanical room was very small to begin with and now they are adding a boiler as well as piping and an indirect tank. “Things where very cramped,” says Ridgeway.
Quick Notes:
• According to Ridgeway, we have a boiler pump for the boiler on closely spaced tees. There’s a snowmelt pump not installed yet that will be over the door and a indirect pump for the indirect heater not installed yet. Then we have the one pump you can see which will actually be replaced with a Grundfos Magna series pump due to the multiple zones. We typically use the low loss headers but did not on this job.
• Balancing is done at the REHAU PROBALANCE manifold for the floor radiant. Temperatures are balanced with motorized mixing valves and HTP VISON 2 control Zones by Caleffi zone control.
• ProPress is great. I solder and braze with the best of them. I have done everything from 4″ massive boilers and chillers pipe work to 1/2 plumbing and no issues and no leaks. With a 20-year track record and 10s of thousands of fittings.
• All this and we’re allowed only 4 feet of wall in which to install. Not shown yet is the domestic hot water that’s going to be installed in front of the manifolds between boiler and panel.
• Zip ties are temporary until the clevis hangers show up; they did a great job holding pipe straight while they put it in.
• Snowmelt — we install tubing in the driveway, walkway and stairs and pump hot water through it from a boiler. The concrete then gets to a set-point temp above 32 degrees and melts the snow and ice on the drive turning it into water then vapor. This way no salting, plowing or shoveling is needed.
Energy Savings:
Two furnaces and ac systems are both 2 stage 17 seer
Boiler — Lochinvar knight 211,000 (97% efficient)
Water heater —Lochinvar indirect
Location: Chicago Ill. — Wrigleyville
Date started: Jan 18 2015
Date Finished: Projected date to finish July 20th
Size of Project: 6,000-sq ft-home
Workers onsite: 2
Budget: $68,000.00
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