I started some work on the hydronic system. Besides the boiler, there's a whole lot of other parts needed - pumps, valves, supports, pump controller, thermostat, thermometers, pressure relief, etc.
I'm building my own "Integration Panel". That's all those balance of system parts mounted together on a board. I'm copying the one on display at my local Menards home improvement store. The Integration Panel at the store costs $1600! I figure I could just buy the parts and assemble it myself for about half that.
Of course, once I had the bag of parts home, it looked much more complicated!
It took a while, but I arranged all the parts, cut copper tubing to length, and dry-fit the parts. Here's what that looked like.
After that, it was quite a bit of soldering pipes and fittings. I don't have much experience doing this, so I practiced a little first on some scrap pipe and cheap fittings. After that, I attempted the pipe sweating for real.
Most of the pipe flanges and valves are designed for sweat fittings. There were numerous elbows and other locations where I could have used Shark-Bite style push on connectors, but those connectors get EXPENSIVE fast! I did end up using just a few of them because they are removable. That means that I could pull them back off later - for example to add in a connection for wood-boiler heated water.
Here's a video on what I've done so far.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty bad echo in my garage right now, and plastic sheeting doesn't do a good job of keeping the car noise out. At least I have a roof over my head keeping the rain and snow away!