Limited Heating Zones - What Can Be Done

I am looking into an older and very large home. The home was built in 1932 with only 2 zones, forced hot water and radiators.

However, there is not one zone on the secod floor and another on the first floor. Rather, one zone is the main living area and four bedrooms at top of main stair, the second zone is the kitchen and bedrooms & bath at top of kitchen stair.

So the zones are separated vertically.

I would like to add more zones so that 1) the heat can be controlled from upstairs or downstairs, and 2) there can be multiple zones on each floor to allow for isolation of rooms when they are not in daily use.

Is this easily doable?

And any insights into how it might be done, or pointers to where I can research this more?

thanks

 

I doubt it from the description you've given.

Probably a LOT of repiping to be done and this means ripping up walls and floors most likely.

Beware of what is called 'micro-zoning'. This is where the individual zones are made too small and leads to problems of 'short cycling' the boiler because it is MUCH larger than it needs to be when just one zone calls for heat.

Spend your money FIRST on improving the building envelope in order to keep the heat you pay for INSIDE the home rather than leaking out everywhere.

AIR SEALING is more important than insulation in terms of heat loss, but they BOTH need to be done.

Insulation and Caulk are fuels that you pay for ONCE.

 

Depends entirely on how the various radiators are currently piped. It might be fairly easy or it might entail a massive amount of repiping.

 

Also, if the idea is saving fuel... I doubt that the expense to convert to multiple smaller zones will save you anything noticable in the way of fuel. It would probably be huge expense for little, if any, gain.