The Duke Mansion Mystery

https://heatinghelp.com/dead-men-tales/the-duke-mansion-mystery/

by userbinator • 5 years ago

97 18 5 years ago

hinoki• 5 years ago

I thought Dan Holohan sounded familiar, and a quick search showed the excellent talk of his that was posted back in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18430512

About steam heating instead of water heating.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 5 years ago

That was far more interesting than you'd think

bombcar• 5 years ago

A similar problem can occur if you "upgrade" an older house to modern sealing/insulation techniques - all of a sudden you don't have fresh air leaking in and you get things like downdrafts on the hot water heater exhaust[1].

https://structuretech.com/how-to-fix-water-heater-backdrafti...

[1] Yes, yes, I know, but it's only a cold water heater when it starts up, then it's a hot water heater, or at least a hot water maintainer.

zeckalpha• 5 years ago

Hey, that’s my inspection company! They have other good posts including a “Worst Inspection Photos of 2016” where my prior house made the cut.

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

This looks like a problem of "flat hierarchy" - there's no one responsible for anything. If a problem arises, we all just scratch our heads for a while and go back to sleep.

I noticed that someone had placed an oscillating fan inside the ductwork, just before the indirect heater. “What’s this for?” I asked the plumber.
“I’m trying to blow the heat upstairs,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to be working, though, and that’s what’s got me stumped. Heat rises.”
“Actually, it doesn’t,” I said. “Hot air rises.”
“Well, same thing, right?”
“Not exactly,” I said. "Hot air will rise, but only if cold air can take its place."
“I don’t get it.”
“Come here; I’ll show you.” I followed the large sheet-metal duct back to where it met the foundation wall. “Where does this go?” I asked.
“Outside,” he said.
“Where outside?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t do outside. I do inside.”

[...]

I waded into the greenery and stomped around on it for a while. “The gardeners aren’t going to like that,” the plumber said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I do outside.”
And that’s when my stomping made a hollow sound. I smiled. “Got a shovel?” He went to get one and I waited, and while I waited, I thought like air. If I were air, how would I get into this house? He came back in a few minutes and handed me the shovel. I dug down about six inches and hit plastic. Clear plastic. I moved some more of the dirt out of the way and saw the metal bars of the old air-inlet grate.

[...]

When the gardener showed up, I explained what we were doing and how the air wouldn’t move across the red-hot indirect heaters because there was no fresh air coming into the house. He understood but then explained how ugly those ground-level grates were and how they had decided to cover them all with sheets of clear plastic, topsoil and pachysandra. “That’s why the house is cold,” I said.
The gardener pointed to the plumber. “It’s his job to keep it warm. It’s my job to keep it green.”
“The problem’s outside,” I said. “He doesn’t do outside. You do.”
And we went back and forth like that for a while until the gardener reluctantly agreed to remove one of the clear plastic sheets, just to prove me wrong.

Clearly, the ultimate fault lies with the original architects, who unfairly designed a heating system that existed both outside and inside the house. But it's also interesting to note that the plumber's entire job was to understand how the house worked, and not only did he not understand it, he didn't seem to feel there was any reason why he should understand it.

jaclaz2• 5 years ago

This looks like a problem of "flat hierarchy" - there's no one responsible for anything.

Yep, and it happens all the times, a classic example in construction are fan-coils:

1) the plumbers have in their contract the installation of the (new) fancoils for heating/air conditioning, they mount them and connect them to water lines.

2) the electricians bring nearby the electric line to power them.

3) none of the two have explicitly in their contract the chore of actually connecting the power to the fan-coil, the plumbers say that it is electrician's work, the electrician's say that it is included in plumbers work as they only have to bring the line.

mcculley• 5 years ago

I had a similar problem with my last house. The hot water system was connected to the A/C which had a heat pump. The A/C was supposed to help heat the water. When it failed, it was difficult to find a plumber who understands such systems and the A/C guys were uncomfortable with a hot water system connected to the A/C system.

dmos62• 5 years ago

That's a nice corner of the internet. A great, niche story and the commentors are old-school plumbers with stories to add.

rob742• 5 years ago

It’s how the rich got their fresh air back in the day. Fuel bills were not a concern.

I once had a tour in a now-empty former Siemens office building in Munich (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...) built in the sixties. This 75 meter highrise had the same kind of heating: cold air was sucked in through a mushroom-shaped structure at the side of the building, heated electrically in a huge room in the basement, and piped into every office room where it came in through vents under the windows. The "used" warm air was then collected and pumped straight outside again. Fuel/electricity bills were apparently not a concern for Siemens either - this was the pre-oil crisis era, plus they were a major player in the nuclear industry...

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

I thought this is the standard way to do HVAC in large buildings: you pull in and condition the outside air, push it through ducts ("supply flow") to every room in the building, then collect the "used" air through separate ducting ("return flow") and pull it to the basement, reclaim some of the energy, and then push it out.

(Or maybe it was? It's increasingly common to see office buildings with lots of AC units on the side walls - but I suspect that's HVAC equivalent of Conway's law: where every floor may have a different owner, it makes less sense to invest in central HVAC.)

Other than ensuring heat pumps are involved at entry/exit stage, I'm not sure how you could make it more fuel-conservative. Some wins can be had if you put enough smarts in the ducts, but overall, there's a price you have to pay for near-total control over the air.

Also, the article seems to be implying that ducts were (still are!) made from metal because it was cheap, and nobody cared about energy leakage. But it's not that - the ducts are made from metal because of friction. Over the length of the ducting, inner wall roughness adds up into static pressure your blowers will have to fight - so you want to minimize that, to save on energy use and wear.

rob742• 5 years ago

The guy who organized the tour didn't mention anything about a heat pump - and he was the developer who had bought the building, so I guess he would have known. Heat pumps were invented much earlier, but didn't become commonplace for this purpose until after the oil crisis. Plus, IIRC the system was only HV without the AC. With added AC and heat pumps to reduce the heat loss, it definitely makes more sense...

sokoloff• 5 years ago

It’s not exactly that way, though it might rhyme with that.

I think it’s more accurate to think of “air is taken from conditioned spaces via return ducts to the air handlers, where it is conditioned (filtered, heated, cooled, re or de-humidified) and then supplied via vents; separately, there may be active exchange of fresh air from outside via an HRV/ERV to ensure adequate air changes. (Many older buildings rely on leakage for the latter purpose, sometimes supported by using inside air for combustion [which will draw outside air in].)”

The difference is that the demand for fresh air is largely independent of the temperature needs of the space, so you want to decouple the fresh air supply from the temperature change. (You don’t want a massive increase in fresh air on the coldest or hottest/most humid day.)

Kosirich• 5 years ago

Couldn't an waste air heat recuperation be fitted in way that would keep the architecture preserved? Seems such a waste to have this kind of heating in this day and age. I'm guessing the temperature and humidity wary a lot inside, so if not for the sake of bills or the environment, proper air conditioning could be done for the sake of comfort.

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

I wanted to see a pic of the mansion and apparently the whole thing has been demolished!

https://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/land-enviro...

imglorp• 5 years ago

Hugged. https://web.archive.org/web/20210815024516/https://heatinghe...

_dark_matter_• 5 years ago

Dan Holohan, the author, wrote the canonical book on hot water heating: "Pumping Away". I replaced all the boiler piping in my house and used this book as guidance; it's a great read if you have a boiler system.

The Duke Mansion Mystery

Related Stories