Modine Steam Heater

[eganter]

Hello,

Does anyone have any experience with Modine Steam Heaters? We are planning on heating our facility with surplus steam from our boiler using a Modine Hydronic heating unit.

http://www.modinehvac.com/web/products/hydronic-unit-heaters-1/horizontal-hydronic-hshc.htm

It makes sense because it's an explosion proof system and takes advantage of our boiler. I'm having trouble calculating how much boiler HP the heater will utilize. We estimate that we will need about 185,000 BTU to keep us warm. Can anyone offer some advice on how much additional boiler power over our current needs we will need?

Cheers!

Eric

[mendodistilling]

Find some plumber or geothermal engineer to do this for you. It's common to use these in geothermal loop setups. You can also employ a heat exchanger and storage tank to preheat the water to 130f and start with hotter water right away.

[Silk City Distillers]

1 boiler hp = ~33,500 btu

So, 185,000 is about 5.5hp but with efficiency losses, is closer to 6.

Your plumber will know exactly how to hook it up, it's pretty straight forward. What I would recommend though, is when you are using steam for process - have some way to automatically turn off the heater. The last thing you need when distilling is a wavering steam main pressure because of the facility heating demand.

Frankly, I wouldn't oversize the boiler to account for heating during processing. Instead, I would use the heater before and after operations. No sense oversizing the boiler when there is little process demand for half the day. In addition, when you are running the equipment will all be throwing off excess heat. We only turned on the heat twice this winter because of this, and we're in the cold northeast.