hydronic heat plus residetial hot water?

[reinger]

Is there a single boiler that will accomplish both needs? ??? My water heater is at the end of its life (28 years!) and the boiler for the home heat is the same age. Am I better off with a single unit, if available, or two separate units?

[fredfl]

I had an oil fired boiler with baseboard hot water and it also supplied domestic hw. It had no storage for hw and I used to use about 250 gallons of oil a year for hw. I believe that the boilers with storage are probably more efficient as mine used run 4 -6 times a day whether you used the hot water or not.

[MadTripper]

There are several units that supply your heating needs as well as a domestic loop. Their efficiency isn't the best but they work well.

My suggestion would be to look at installing an indirect water heater for your domestic needs. This is effectively a holding tank that acts as an additional heating zone. The newer storage tanks are incredibly efficient losing less than a 1/4 degree per hour so they don't call for heat very often when in standby. On top of that, it is nearly impossible to run out of hot water with these units. Our family of 5 uses a 40 gallon unit and we can take two showers at once while running the dishwasher and never notice any loss in water temperature.

I personally went with Weil-McLain products. My boiler is an Ultra 80 and my indirect is an Ultra Plus 40. To my knowledge, this is the most efficient heating system available. With my radiant design, I attain 98% AFUE. I researched Trinity, Buderus, Peerless, and a few others before I chose the Weil setup. Let me just warn you that reading boiler manuals is pretty boring and very time consuming but worth the effort.

Let me know if I can help you out and here is a link to Weil's indirects.

http://www.weil-mclain.com/products/display/20-Water%20heater

Tripper