Radiant Loop Temperature

Those of you running radiant loops for your heating systems, what BTU/sqft do you target? We were doing some math yesterday and came up with a system that’ll deliver ~13BTU/sqft which seems low compared to design values I’ve seen online (15-35BTU/sqft). How has your experience been?

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I’m also curious about this. And do you guys typically have to do anything else special with your hydronic design - given the low grade nature of hashrate heat?

I approach every hydronic loop with the idea that I want the maximum amount of BTU/ft^2 that I can get out of it. For example, if I have a choice between 1/2" pex or 5/8" pex, I will spend a little extra money and use 5/8" at a tight interval.

The higher your output capability, the lower the temperature you can run your miners at, which will improve their efficiency.

If you configure your immersion heating loop with the proper heat dump, you can set it at a constant temperature, such as 45c, which should be able to heat your glycol mix to about 35c.

Basically you want the house to heat soak at the lowest possible fluid temperature. Even if you or new owners of the property move away from hashrate heating in the future, its still going to result in a more efficient system.

So I think the premise of the question being asked is a little bit off because the BTU per ft^2 is more of a dependent variable… it changes on how efficient you can make the system, and there is nothing but incentive to make every output surface as efficient as possible.

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