Bye Bye Monoflow, hello Pex manifold

For three years now I have been dealing with an unbalanced monoflow system heating the upstairs of my house. The original installer ran wall-to-wall fine tube baseboard in the rooms with no regard to heat loss, and installed the thermostat in the hallway right at the top of the stairs. This caused a few problems. 1. The temperature downstairs directly impacts the operation of the upstairs thermostat. 2. The monoflow tee's were installed only about 6" apart, and barely created any flow through the long runs of baseboard. I cut the entire monoflow system out, put the bathroom on its own zone, and put the rest of the bedrooms on a manifold with pex tubing. I am now able to throttle the flow and balance the heat room to room, and to top it off....I installed a wireless thermostat in the center bedroom. I also added a few valves and a boiler drain to allow me to purge each radiator loop from the basement...no more bleeding!

Hey Rob! Nice job on the pex! Did you snake the pex up the outside walls or was there an easier/ better way to get er done?

Hey Scott, the first guy that installed hydronic heat in this house boxed in a few pipe chases along the inside walls. The original 1/2" black iron supply/return pipes were still there, so I just used the proper brass fittings to adapt them to pex in the basement. I don't know what they used for pipe dope in the 50's, but I was able to take 50+ year old fittings apart with 18" pipe wrenches.

On a side note, the guy that installed this stuff the first time probably knew what he was doing. I think the trouble started when the boiler was swapped in the late 70's, and the original convectors were replaced with fin-tube radiation...I'm sure thats when all balance problems started.