How can I save money on a boiler? - Heating & Cooling

The Beckett HeatManger is a microprocessor controlled device that will manage the on/off cycles of your boiler. Every time your boiler has to shut down and then restart your have just lost a bit of efficiency. By reducing the start/stop cycles of your boiler you not only reduce fuel consumption, but you also reduce wear on the parts of the boiler and emissions coming from your boiler. Your burner burns very inefficiently on startup and shut down. When I have my combustion analyzer on a burner it goes crazy with bad gasses right after shutdown.

If you have a fuel oil or gas fired boiler and you are wondering how you can save money on your heating bill without replacing your boiler then I have good news for you! By adding a simple device to the burner of your boiler you can be saving at least 10% in minutes

With this control if your thermostat requests heat and the HeatManager has sensed that there is heat available in the boiler, it will not start the burner until the heat is used up. When the burner is running, the HeatManger will optimize the runtime to match the boiler output to the load.

The unit is very easy to install. It is mounted to the junction box under the relay and wired into the normal burner relay wiring. There are a couple of sensors that need to be attached. One senses the supply water temperature for heating, coming out of the boiler and the other senses domestic hot water boiler supply temperature.

Even if you would decide to get a professional to install this unit you will be on the road to saving big dollars while only spending few hundred bucks. Then when the price of fuel oil and natural gas begins to rise again, which it will this winter, you will be getting even more savings from your small investment.

Saving money is always a good thing, but when you can combine saving money with greater comfort than I would call that a great thing!

You're looking to install a new hot water boiler or replace your existing boiler. You come across something called a "modulating" boiler. You wonder what on earth that means. I will attempt to explain some of the features of a modulating boiler.

How nice would it be if you could have your boiler make just enough heat to keep your house warm and nothing more? Your thermostat tells your boiler that you need heat in the house. The boiler starts up and heats the water that runs through the pipes to heat your house. The water does not heat up to temperatures that are more than just warm. But you notice that the temperature in your house is staying right where you want it to be.
This boiler is no ordinary boiler. It knows what the temperature is outside and varies your water temperature to make just the heat needed to keep you comfortable. The modulating boiler also runs much more then a normal boiler would but you can see by your gas bill that you are getting great efficiency from this thing.

The feature that makes this wonder so great is that it has the ability to vary the fire that heats the water up and down so that the water temperature stays precisely where the computer brain in the boiler wants it to be. This temperature is figured by measuring the outdoor temperature and changing the water temperature based on that. The colder the weather is outside, the hotter the water is going through your system.

With a system like this you will notice that your heat will run longer and still not cost anymore money. This makes you more comfortable. The modulating boiler will give you just enough heat to keep you warm without wasting much of the heat that a normal boiler would. This type of furnace will give you the most efficient heating possible on any given day.

Before buying a new heating system or replacing your old hot water boiler make sure that you check into a system that will modulate the fire and also vary your heating water temperatures according to the outdoor temperatures. This will save you money and give you a very comfortable heating system.

It is the coldest day of the year and your boiler is chugging along. However you notice that your house is slowly cooling off even though the boiler is running. Then you notice that the boiler is shutting down even though your house is not up to the thermostat temperature setting.

You look into the situation farther and notice that you boiler temperature is below say 180F. What is shutting the boiler off? The device that controls the temperature of your boiler is called an aquastat. This device senses the temperature of the water in your boiler, and then fires the burners to keep the water at the temperature call for by the aquastat.



The other role that this device may play is to keep the boiler from getting too hot and making steam. However for this time we will concentrate on the lower side and the heat of the water. If you have a house that has barely enough baseboard or radiators for that really cold day then you need your water to be very hot or around 200F. This will give the water enough BTU's to carry around the piping to give off to keep your house warm. The downside is that it also makes your boiler less efficient when it needs to heat the water this hot.

So, now you know that if you need more heat you can turn the aquastat up higher to get more heat and turn it lower on the milder days to save energy. Another way to do this is to buy and install a smart control that will do that automatically for you. These are called an outdoor reset control and will vary your boiler temperature according to the outdoor temperature, saving you money and keeping you warm all at the same time.

Now, the one thing you need to know yet. The aquastat is usually a gray box with a screw driver slot in a little wheel that has numbers on it. It is often hidden pretty well and may take some looking to find it. Some of the newer boilers may have a digital one that is in a bigger gray box. Read the instructions to learn to change the temperatures.

Setting your aquastat correctly can save a lot of money and it can be the difference between keeping you warm or not.

I was recently emailed a question by a fellow that wanted to know if an outdoor reset control would help him cut fuel oil costs for a seasonal home in that was only used occasionally in the winter. The short answer is yes, however there may be a better control for him and his particular circumstance.

Energy saving devices are great things in many ways and they usually do save you money. The problem is that you need to use the right device for the job that you want to do. Using the right control to do the job you need is the question that needs to be answered. Just because you spend a lot of money on a control it does not mean that you will save a lot of money.

What kind of fuel are you burning? What type of boiler do you have and at what water temperatures can it be run at? These are a few of the critical questions you must consider.

If you have a condensing gas boiler and have a heating system that will heat at fairly low water temperatures for most of the season then an outdoor reset control will be worth installing. If you have an oil boiler that needs to run at hotter water temperatures to prevent condensation then you may want to use a different control.

Oil boilers often run a hot fire and usually are not piped in such a way as to get the heat away from the boiler as fast as it is produced. Because of this the boiler will be cycling many times an hour. This cycling will decrease the efficiency of the boiler and cost you money.

By installing a Beckett HeatManger on your oil fire hot water boiler you will make the run times longer and increase your efficiency. The Beckett HeatManager will smooth out the cycling and get you the comfort and efficiency that you want for much less money than many of the outdoor reset controllers. In many cases you will save the price of the control in a month. The best part is that many average do it yourself persons can install this control themselves!

Using the right tool to do the job you want will save you fuel, time, and money. Make sure that you find the right product to install before you just start throwing money at a problem.