Mansion converts from steam to hot water heating

NEWPORT, R.I. — At the height of the Gilded Age, Newport, R.I., was the summer playground of America’s wealthy. The Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Wideners all built their summer “cottages”— some of the most opulent mansions in the hemisphere — along Bellevue Avenue. Seven of those mansions are today National Historic Landmarks. Some are still privately owned and used as summer residences. One such mansion has been under the careful stewardship of Jeff Ward who has been property manger and building engineer for going on a decade. “I don’t know how I ended up here!” Ward said. “A couple of guys, RISD [the Rhode Island School of Design] students were working on a project that was out of their depth and called me in. I met the owner while I was doing a project for them and eight years later I’m still working for the same family.” The current family has been in residence since about 2003. The original house was completed in 1929 and underwent extensive renovation in 1935. “Robert Goulet, the industrialist, bought the house… and did a complete restoration adding a ballroom and an entire wing to the house,” Ward said. Amenities include a greenhouse, a library with 400-year-old walls, and even a decorative Austrian furnace. “I don’t think it ever functioned,” Ward said, “it’s just this big, beautiful, glazed, 3,000-lb. furnace on one side of the ballroom.”

For decades the mansion’s real source of heat was a gigantic oil-fired Smith 350 1.2 million Btu boiler that fed steam to 67 cast iron radiators. Even for a house with almost 20,000-sq.ft., the boiler delivered nearly double the necessary capacity. At that time — and especially for the upper classes — energy efficiency was simply not a consideration. “Houses in this time frame were built with the 1918 influenza epidemic in mind,” Ward explained. “In winter they wanted to be able to heat this house with all the windows wide open.” While the old system could get the house up to 90°F fairly quickly — the surface of some radiators could climb to as much as 256°F — to keep the house at just 50°F for the winter could cost anywhere from $15,000 to $24,000.

On top of that, the boiler was subject to breakdowns that were becoming more and more difficult to deal with. “Every time we did a repair job it was costing $10,000,” Ward said. “I would have to bring in a couple professionals, wait for them to give up, jump in, bring in the block and tackle… just really difficult.” Custom parts needed to be fabricated, mountings needed to be re-cemented. Even for a family that was only occasionally using the property, the situation was becoming intolerable. Almost three years ago Jeff Ward got the green light from the owners to design and install a new hot-water-based heating system with a modern, efficient mod-con boiler at its heart. But there was a catch: the owners wanted to keep the vintage radiators that added so much to the look and feel of the mansion. While beautiful, the radiators did not work well with moving water. “The baffles were too thin,” Ward said. “I couldn’t get them to aspirate, I couldn’t get them purged completely. So they were a real battle.” Additionally, many of the radiators were in different sizes and configurations, making it a nightmare to accurately size the new system. Ward and his team spent almost two years cleaning the existing radiators. All 67 (weighing on average 250 lb., with the heaviest being 600 lb.) were taken outside, rinsed in muratic acid and washed with CLR before being reinstalled. Ward also built his own radiators inside the existing “shells” using 1-in. copper tube with 4-in. fins, overlapping and putting as much tubing as possible into the available space. In addition, Ward installed about 4,000-sq.ft. of radiant floor heating throughout the home, mostly using Viega Climate Trak. “It’s a snap-on product,” Ward explained. “8 ft. long panels, 4-in. wide aluminum with a centered ½-in. tube you snap your tubing into. They are made for retrofits. They work like a big heat sink. You screw those up in each bay, then insulate heavily.”