Should I use a hot water boiler or a steam boiler for heating?

We use heating boilers in winter. There are two kinds of boilers for civil heating: hot water boilers and steam boilers. A hot water boiler is a boiler that produces hot water, and a steam boiler is a boiler that produces steam.

In actual heating applications, hot water boilers are generally used for heating. Because most of the radiators or fan coils, floor heating, etc. are heated by hot water, even if steam boilers are used, they generally use plate exchange to exchange steam into hot water. The replacement of steam with hot water adds a heat exchange link, which increases the heat exchange loss. At the same time, the use of steam boilers for heating also has the following disadvantages: 1. The temperature of the heat exchanger changes too quickly, which is easy to cause water leakage in the heat exchanger. 2. The pressure change of the heat exchanger is large and it is easy to burst. 3. The surface temperature of the radiator is high and it is easy to burn. 4. If the heating pipe effect is not good, it will form water hammer and water hammer, produce noise and damage radiators and pipes. 5. The thermal efficiency is not high.

Compared with steam, the advantages of hot water as a heating medium have long been proven in practice, so the concept of using water as the boiler heating medium as much as possible is emphasized. However, when the proportion of steam heat load is large, and the total heat load is not very large, the steam heating and hot water heating systems are often complex, the temperature is high, and the boiler selection is difficult, but the energy-saving effect is limited, so at this time, the unified heating medium is often more reasonable technically and economically.

Therefore, in addition to some special circumstances when heating, we should try to use hot water boilers to heat.