Hydronic Heating And Cooling: Using Water As Medium To Transfer Heat
Hydronic heating and cooling implies using water as the medium for heat transfer when either heating or cooling an area, and other examples include the time tested means of using steam as well as hot water, though in modern times, with an abundance of high rise buildings requiring to be warmed and also cooled, hydronic heating and cooling has proved to be a very effective solution.
District Level Systems
It is possible to use chillers as well as cooling towers by themselves or even in tandem to provide water cooling while boilers can heat the water to provide warm water to the building. In the case of some of the bigger cities in America, there are also hydronic heating and cooling systems used at the district level that use underground piping to provide steam as well as chilled water and any building in the district can, upon paying a fee, get connected and gets either hot or cold water or both.
Some of the typical hydronic heating and cooling systems are of two basic types including steam and hot water and these are further classified as flow generation, temperature, pressurization, piping arrangement as well as pumping arrangement. Furthermore, hydronic heating and cooling systems can also be categorized into different piping arrangement types including single pipe, two pipe steam, three pipe and also four pipe, and finally series loop.
However, the earliest hydronic heating and cooling systems were the single-pipe steam systems that sent steam into radiators in which the heat was given up by the steam and condensed into water, and through use of gravity the condensed steam was sent back into the steam supply piping and on to the boiler where it was once more transformed into steam and sent back into the radiators.
Single-pipe systems are not known to have more than limited ability to provide steam in great volumes and their ability to also control how much steam is sent to individual radiators is also limited, and thus these limitations have resulted in such systems no longer being used.
In the more modern types of hydronic heating and cooling systems, it is normal to heat water instead of steam and thus it makes it also possible to used chilled water and thus is able to provide air conditioning as well. The water loop is a good example and when used in homes means having a single pipe that in turn loops the flow through individual radiators. Another feature of each and every hydronic heating and cooling system is its ability to totally eliminate air from within the system, because this feature will mean getting a number of years of quality performance.
