We have an oil furnace and pipes carrying hot water to the tap (from the water tank) and to hot-water baseboard heaters (directly from the furnace). These pipes have foam insulation padding wrapped around most straight-a-ways, but it’s far from full coverage. No elbows are wrapped, and the insulation wasn’t carefully measured before installation (i.e. the wrap doesn’t go fully from elbow to elbow).
I imagine that the length of the elbows alone would add up to a good amount of uninsulated pipe running though a cold basement. Is this common? Is it done this way to add a nominal amount of heat to the basement? Or is it not cost effective to track down all the exposed pipe and add insulation?
The insulation is cheap, your time is not. If the oil burner quits for some reason while your away some sub-zero weekend … you may be looking at five figures in repairs. So the insulation is what they call in the trade “cheap insurance”.
Tip: Run a strip of Red Green brand duct tape down the seams of the insulation and around each joint. A sharp knife cuts the stuff easily, so take your time and make the mitered elbows well. Don’t be Red Green with the Red Green duct tape, use it freely.
I’m kind of confused, do you have a furnace or do you have a boiler? I tend to think of a furnace as a forced-air, filtered device. A boiler is a whole different thing.
Does the hot tap water and the water for the baseboards come from the same device?
I have a boiler and none of the pipes are wrapped. I did wrap the pipes coming from the water heater though, which is a separate device.
This is correct. People commonly call their heating unit a furnace, but if it’s not forced air, it’s the incorrect term. A boiler heats water and uses piping to distribute it for radiated heat; a furnace uses forced air and ducts.
Oh. I guess it’s a boiler, but don’t those have big tanks and feature prominently in horror movies?This is a smallish, enclosed rectangular box with a flue and assorted pipes running to and fro. Heat is supplied by these hot pipes that run into baseboard units with radiative fins inside. There’s also a pipe that runs from it to an ostensible hot water tank.
The frozen/burst pipes that watchwolf49 was referring to. An ill-timed vacation/ice storm/power outage and sploosh. Not a super-pressing concern, but one with a probability that’s quantumly entangled with thinking about it but not doing anything (probability approaches 1), and with taking the time going through the motions to insulate the pipes (probability recedes to negligible).
What you’ve described is a boiler: basically, a pressure vessel with incoming and outgoing piping for water, a gas line to fire the burners, and some peripheral equipment like a pump, an aquastat, etc. Household boilers are very compact, since they don’t need to supply heat/pressure for something the size of an apartment building or an industrial facility.
But to actually answer the question, I would certainly insulate the hot tap water pipes. I did and it made some bit of difference in how fast the hot water came through the tap. I don’t know about insulating the radiator heat pipes though. As I said, mine aren’t.
I installed a neat contraption on our pipes (er, I had a plumber install it. I’m just learning to sweat pipes, and I’m not up to messing with the main pipes just yet). It’s two parts, a pressure sensitive valve and a small pump/timer assembly.
The valve goes in the master bath’s faucets, connecting the hot water line directly to the cold water. The bath is the furthest from the tank, and to get there the pipes run above the insulated, but unheated garage. We’ve had pipe-freezing problems there in the past even when we’re home, so in the winter the hot tap was COLD and took forever to come up to temperature.
At set times (which is kind of complicated, because working from home means we keep odd hours), the pump kicks in (the pump is located right at the hot water tank). The valve responds to the increase in pressure, opens, and hot water flows through to the cold side. It’s a bit like opening the tap at certain intervals, except instead of going down the drain it runs back into the pressure tanks.
The result is that during the winter, we’re never all that far from either tepid water, which quickly turns hot (a huge change) or relatively hot water right away. The only downside is a little warmth in the cold taps, but that hasn’t bothered us yet.
It’s set to turn on four or five times per day–we’ll eventually see if insulating the pipes takes that down to three to four.
(Other side note: we just had the expansion tank replaced, so yep, it must be a boiler.)
