OWB Question

[OUBrew]

I have an open system right now for my OWB that pumps the water into the house through a plate exchanger and back to the OWB. The existing indoor Polaris boiler takes the hot water from the exchanger and sends it through my floors but also my house hot water.

My question is...can I re-plumb the OWB supply and return to go directly into the floors and bypass the plate exchanger and indoor boiler? Basically keeping it separate or closed from the rest of the hot water in the house?

 

[sw18x]

Keep in mind that the water for your radiant floor heat can't exceed a certain temperature or you risk damaging whatever the material is. In my case, the house is heated with baseboard heat which requires that the water running through the heat exchanger be at least 160 degrees to keep up with (I also have a gas boiler which supplements the OWB - preheated water from the heat exchanger runs through the reservoir of the boiler before heading up into the baseboards), but in the garage it's radiant concrete floor heat. My OWB feeds both. Water running through concrete shouldn't exceed 130 degrees or so or it can damage the fibermesh, so I installed a mixing valve which lets me run 130 into the garage and 160 plus into the house from the OWB. It sounds like your setup is simpler so you might be able to directly route the boiler, and just run your OWB at a lower temperature. Guys on this forum are pretty knowledgeable but if you run into specific questions about home heating this forum is very helpful too:

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