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The Manifest Advantages of Manifolds in Hydronic Systems

When pricing out components for a hydronic system, it can be tempting to skip preassembled manifolds in favor designing your own with piping and connectors. Don’t do that; designing your own is willing submission to death by a thousand cuts. When it comes down to effectiveness and overall cost, preassembled manifolds come out on top and it’s not even close. To learn more about how preassembled manifolds can save you time, save you money, and increase your business, simply read on!

The Issue of Cost

Time, labor, and actual cost are all factors when you’re looking at the total cost of a preassembled manifold compared to designing and building your own. When you’re just looking at the numbers, building your own can seem like a better deal. Preassembled manifolds are an investment, though. On actual cost, designing your own will probably come out ahead, though it’s not a guarantee. It’s easy to look at the low costs of each individual component and think that they won’t amount to much, but once you start adding everything you need in the correct quantity, the costs mount. Even if building your own is cheaper from a purely monetary standpoint, that view fails to take into account the time required to design the proper manifold for your customer’s application as well as the assembly time.

The Advantages of Standardization

Preassembled manifolds offer superior isolation of both entire zones and loops within a zone. They make it easier to control subzones with with actuators, easier to test the pressure of the system, easier to purge the air from a system, and they are easier to install. That’s not enough for you? They are compatible with more types of PEX tubing for radiant applications as well.

We haven’t even gotten to the part where they save you space, which can be the difference between a simple installation and one that becomes unbearably complicated. One virtue of taking up less space is that these manifolds make it easy to have a nice clean installation. That matters to a lot of homeowners, especially with the rise of wall-mounted high-efficiency boilers. Hydronic heating equipment is no longer confined to the utility closet, many homeowners are installing boilers in their laundry rooms and other semi-public spaces of their home. Developing a reputation as an installer who handles installations quickly and cleanly can lead to great word-of-mouth business.

Save Time & Money While Delivering a Superior System

At the end of the day, preassembled manifolds offer enough advantages to be worth the upfront cost every time. They reduce installation time, improve system control, look better and function better when compared to DIY jobs. Let a company like Caleffi sweat the design and construction while you and your customer reap the rewards. Caleffi manifolds are available in a variety of configurations at your local Able Distributors branch.

If you’d like to learn more about Caleffi manifolds, be sure to check out this issue of their idronics journal!