I first went to the big ISH fair in Frankfurt, Germany in 1991 with two buddies, and I think we three were joined by only about 17 other Americans that year. ISH was larger than the Fourth of July, even then, but we were still messing around with standing pilots and oversized everything in those days, and we were certain that the rest of the world would catch up with us, given enough time. After all, we're Americans.
It didn't work out that way, though. Most of the products and technologies we saw at ISH in 1991 were making their way here before long, mainly through the hard work of missionary reps who just kept knocking on doors. Much of what was new got pooh-poohed by the American heating community at first. That's just our way. This new stuff was too exotic, and too expensive, and too metric, And it was technology that the American public would never accept. We knew this without even asking them.
But then, like barcodes and designer coffee, it all started to catch on in a big way, and it gained steam as the '90s rolled toward the turn of the century, and now we take New Hydronics as a commonplace, accepted fact.
Boilers don't really need chimneys, and you can heat a building with water that's not much hotter than what you'd use to shower. And circulators can, and should be, smart enough to know when to slow down as valves close throughout the system, and those valves should be able to tell the difference in temperature within a degree and, yes, we can save energy. And the public will accept all of this, as long as the installer believes in it first, and that is happening more each day.
It's like a river, this ISH. It never stops moving. Last March in Frankfurt, I looked at new boilers that burn wood pellets, and lots of heat pumps. I have been seeing wood-fired boilers for the past 10 years at ISH, and each year more of them appear, but this past March, they were everywhere.
Now, you might think that burning wood is a dirty business, and that Europeans, being so green, would shy from this practice, but it turns out that wood is the greenest fuel of all. Burning wood has become the key to what the Europeans call being, "carbon neutral." It took me some time to get all of this though my thick skull, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
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