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Although it was just past three o'clock in the afternoon, it was almost dark when we checked into our hotel in Stockholm. Snow was falling, but not heavily enough to slow the work of the men who were installing the hydronic snow melt system under the cobblestone sidewalk down the street. Sweden, I quickly learned, is a Wet Head's paradise.
My hotel room, like so many rooms in Europe, had the heating pipes mounted on the outside of the wall. I once asked a European engineer why they install their pipes in such a visible way. "Vee do it dis vay," he explained, "so dat shud dey break, vee can fix dem qvick." In Europe, the stupidity of my questions often stands out like a splattered bug on the windshield of a new BMW. Anyway, my room was as cold as a stainless steel flagpole in January, so I grabbed the TRV's actuator and gave it a manly twist. It spun right up to its limit and stopped, but I didn't hear any water flowing into the panel radiator. Hmmm. I waited a minute. Then I whipped out my Swiss Army knife, unscrewed the actuator from its valve body, popped it off, and recalibrated it to about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. I did this because I knew how to do this. And because I could.
TRVs last a long time because they're so simple in design. You start with a normally open, spring-loaded valve. Next, you take a bellows that's filled with a chemical that's very sensitive to air temperature. Then you enclose the bellows in a tough plastic shell, which you'll twist to adjust the tension on the bellows and change the temperature setting (we'll call this part the "operator"). Finally, you'll mount the operator on the spring-loaded valve and that's a TRV.
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I threw my suitcase on the bed and walked toward the radiator. The room suffered from Eurochill (You're cold? Put on a sweater!). The radiator, of course, was hydronic. Most of the radiators in Europe are hydronic. This one had a thermostatic radiator valve attached to a steel supply line that was the Metric equivalent of about 3/8". Most of the heating professionals I know in America would bet money that you couldn't possibly heat a hotel room with a pipe that puny. But there we were.
Thermostatic radiator valves, or TRVs for short, have been around for a long time. The Empire State building, built in 1929, had them. They ran on steam back then, and they still do today.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
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