Cast Iron Radiators

[byhwdy]

Just bought an old house. We’re having the old hydronic steam boiler removed and switching to a pumped water boiler. The house has a series of cast iron radiators almost none of which match and we’d like to hear some ideas of what to do with them. There are also not enough of them for the whole house and some of them are obviously not properly sized for the rooms they are in (unbalanced heat and rooms without radiators altogether).

Do we keep or remove?
What is the cost of refurbishing and testing? What can we expect?
Can we mix old radiators and new baseboards on the same zone?
How about on putting the radiators on one zone, baseboards on another?
What are other options besides baseboards?

Our thought was to keep half or so (the nicer ones and correctly sized ones) and mix with some other heating register for the rest. Good/bad idea? Thanks

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Heidi Preuss

[Harold KestenholzParticipant]

Don’t mix cast iron and copper-tube baseboard on the same zone, especially in separate rooms on the same circuit, as cast iron and copper baseboard send heat out in different timing and will have large temperature differences. Put all the cast-iron on one loop and copper-tube on another. Cast-iron radiators and cast-iron baseboard can go on one loop. You can also remove sections of radiator and reassemble them (though much work) to make them just the right size

There are non-electric radiation controllers that can permit different control in each room by controlling bypass of water in radiators through the circuit.

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