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Author Topic: Zone valve  (Read 2487 times)

ST98

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Zone valve
« on: November 09, 2013, 06:33:55 AM »
All is well with the burner but after dealing with a 75 degree house I had to try and figure out what's up with the zone valves, two.  They seemed to be always open. So I took the bottoms off and made sure nothing was hanging them open. Nothing. Then I looked the brand up on the Internet and they are normally open valves so when the power goes out they stay open. Which made me scratch my head as to why there was even zone valves in the house. The brand is automag if anyone has heard of them.

So my question is can you wire these so they have power to keep them closed and then the thermostat cuts the power?  Or do I put other zone valves in? 

Things could be worse the house could be 55. Kind of weird on a 17 degree morning sleeping with the bedroom window open to get it down to 70.

Thanks
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slimjim

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Re: Zone valve
« Reply #1 on: November 10, 2013, 09:12:09 AM »
Automags or normally open zone valves are typically used on pressurized boilers in the basement and hooked to heat loops that will ghost flow to the upstairs, allowing you to heat the home in a power outage and dump the heat from the boiler, they should close in a powered system, I'm willing to bet you have a bad wire/connection or burned out transformer.
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Wood boiler sales, service and installation for the Northeastern USA.

ST98

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Re: Zone valve
« Reply #2 on: November 11, 2013, 05:47:13 AM »
I'd like to change it to normally closed zone valves with a manual bypass switch.  I'd be looking for a zone valve with a simple two wires that open and close. I was thinking a Honeywell  8043 or do you have another option for a zone valve?

My house is on an automatic generator so the system comes back on in 10 seconds.

Thanks
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slimjim

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Re: Zone valve
« Reply #3 on: November 11, 2013, 05:57:20 AM »
My concern is why was the system set up with auto-mags to start with, was there ever a pressurized indoor unit hooked up to the system, is there a bypass loop on the zones around the auto-mags, in other words there are two reasons they were used 1 it was set up as a dump zone for a pressurized system or 2 the installer put the wrong zone valve in.
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Wood boiler sales, service and installation for the Northeastern USA.

juddspaintballs

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Re: Zone valve
« Reply #4 on: November 17, 2013, 12:53:25 PM »
I have a Taco Electronic Ball Valve (EBV) on my system.  It uses power to open it and to close it, but once it's in either position it stays in that position with no power holding it there.  If all power is lose to the circuit, the ball valve doesn't change position but it does have an external knob that you can turn to manually move it if you want to.  While they're not cheap, they do work well and I like that it doesn't use any power in either position to hold it in that position. 
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