Hydronic Air Handler - Dragons Breath Heater Review

Ever wondered if there is an inexpensive alternative to baseboard heaters? Find out how to heat your home, with Dragon Breath Heater: technical specifications, design and thermal performance. See how you can install it to heat up small places of your house or other non-conventional spaces you frequently use.

 

 

Dragon Breath Air Handler 100

What Is Dragon Breath Air Handler Unit and How Can It Be Used

Dragons Breath Heater is a hydronic air handler designed by Alternative Heating and Supplies as an inexpensive solution for heating up crawl spaces, such as attics, closets, pantries or soffits.

The heater is conceived to be tucked away in a room and then have air blow into it from an outer boiler as a better alternative to standardized heating solutions.

Dragon Breath Space Heaters mount about anywhere. They are used to heat basements, Garages, workshops, greenhouses, warehouses and about anything you can think of. These units come with fan, water to air exchanger and louvered grills. The fans are speed controllable and are commercial grade units. Stamped fan blades quietly exhaust high air volumes. Made in the USA!

These units will hook to any boiler or wood furnace easily.

 

Dragon Breath Space Heaters

Installation Steps

Installation of Space Heaters is simple and can be done in a couple hours.

Step 1: Mount unit where you want it. You can hang unit or mount a shelve to sit it on.

Step 2: Run the water lines to the Space Heater. This is water which comes from your wood furnace or boiler.

Step 3: Run a wire from the Space heater to thermostat and then plug it in and you're done!

What can a Dragon Breath Air Handling Unit Be Used For?

Dragon Breath Air Handler is an ideal heating solution that can be easily installed in:

• Bonus rooms to replace the electric baseboard heaters
• Double wides with wood boilers
• Small homes, mobile homes, and hunting cabins
• Office spaces inside a warehouse: some people run a warehouse kind of business and they will frame out an office space for themselves, where they need heat and silence. As the standard unit heater is a little bit noisier, the Dragon Breath Air Handler makes a great solution to this problem
• Finished Basements: for people who have a conventional heating system inside their house like a boiler or a hot air furnace. It's very difficult and expensive to run the ductwork or baseboard heating elements in the basement, so installing the Dragon Breath Air Handler can be extremely helpful
• Cold sections of homes, as every house has a space that is the farthest part away from the heating system and it's usually the coldest part of the house
• Heat dumps and brewing distilleries can use it to dump heat into areas of the building where they want to cool off certain water elements. For example, cooling diesel: they run the water through air handlers to dump the heat into a building when they're running diesel generators

Dragon Breath Air Handler Technical Specifications

Design and Performance

It has a very simple design. In the pictures below you can see the inside and outside of a 12 by 12 water to air heat three-pass heat exchanger.

• It has 3.5 inches in depth
• The coil area is 12 by 12 inches
• The motor is 110-volt

 

Dragons Breath Heaters Presentation

 

Dragons Breath Heaters - Design

Case Studies

The Bonus Room Example 1

Project Description

 

Bonus Room Closet Before and After Installation

This is an example of a bonus room installation. In the picture here you can see on the left side how it looks like behind the scenes and on the right side how it looks like when the installation is finished.

What type of boiler can you use?

You can hook the Dragon Breath Air Handler to any type of boilers, such as oil boilers, low-pressure boilers, natural gas boilers, electric boilers, wood or pellet boilers.

Technical Specifications

The air handling unit dimensions are 12 inches / 18 inches / 12 inches.

What you need:

• Supply duct, flexible or rigid
• 110-volt thermostat
• Boiler return
• 110-volt power source
• Hydronic supply and return
• 110-volt thermostat
• Variable Speed Controller (optional)

 

Bonus Room Project Installation Description

 

The installation is straightforward: you mount it and you run your hot water in or hot water out. You run 110-volts to it and then you run your thermostat and you pop it through the wall, as you can see in the picture above, and then you run your ductwork.  

In this case, the supply duct is the upper one and the return is on the other side. We also have a return on this side which will balance the pressure of the two rooms together so that you're getting an even flow in everything. On the right side picture, you can see how it looks when the installation is finished, but the return is on the back side.

 

Bonus Room Installation

In this case, a small filter was installed to be able to slide in and out from the unit and the wall to filter the air as it's going through.

The Bonus Room Example 2

 

Bonus Room Closet Installation - Example 2

Project Description

Here is another example of bonus room installation for a hydronic air handler, and in this case, the installation was made in a basement or in a finished basement application. As you can see in the picture above the air handling unit does not necessitate too much space, which is pretty important to most of the consumers.

This is a complete heating unit which is very easy to install, very inexpensive for what it can do, considering the option you have for heating up any type of space.

What type of boiler can you use?

This heating solution works well on any kind of boilers, so if you wanna hook it up to not an outer wood boiler or an indoor oil fired or propane unit, you will have no problem, they will work the same.

 

Bonus Room Closet Installation

In this picture, you can see the adjustable louver kit. Some people will mount this heating unit in hunting cabins underneath a shelf, for example, and direct the air through it.

How much does an air handler cost?

The price for the above air handling unit is about $60 - $70.

For current pricing, give us a call and we'll be glad to keep you informed.

Technical Specifications

 

Dragon Breath Technical Specifications

The depth, which is A, is 19 inches, the height is about 16 inches, and the width of it is about 12.5 inches. The plenum is 12 by 12 inches.

Most of the ductwork that you find at home depots are easily mountable to this heating solution.

You can see the BTU ratings of the units based on the water temperature. So that's 200 degrees, you're gonna get 68,000 BTUs. It produces about 1,000 CFM which is the fan, but you gotta be pumping about 12 gallons a minute to get these kinds of results. Speed variable, yes, and a lot of other information that if you're interested you can read up on, or call us.

Installation and Features

First, you should make a plenum and then use a rigid 8 inches round duct to distribute the hot air. Then you need to run a rigid 6 or 8-inch duct and then ran the thermostat through the wall and into the room somewhere.

This mounting system can be mounted on a shelf or in the areas such as the rafters above the room the area of the room that you are trying to heat and then run the duct work from there.

If you choose to spend a little bit extra money on the quality of the fan, you can benefit from a variable speed.

So for example, if you're heating a room or a hunting cabin that's only 15 by 20 square feets, this is the ideal solution to have a lot of heated air. If you consider that the highest capacity of air is making a lot of noise, then what you can do is you turn down the speed of the fan so that it gets much quieter and you also don’t heat the room too much.

Then you need to mount your thermostat, which comes down to the variable speed which regulates the speed of the unit and then right to the unit. And because it’s all 110-volt, you will see that it is easy to install.

It is very small, compact and complete unit with a great heating capacity.

To give you an idea of how much you can heat at 70,000 BTU is that 200-degree temperature hydronic water. A house that's about 3,800 square feet to be very well insulated needs about 140,000 BTU to heat the whole entire house. So 70,000 should be able to do 1,500 to 1,700 square feet of good insulation. That's a lot of heating for a very small unit.

Conclusion

Dragons Breath Air Handlers are the quietest most inexpensive high-quality heating solutions that work with any type of boiler to efficiently heat up any type of space. They are powerful and easy to install.

There's not another water to air heat exchanger out there that has the same quality. There are some out there that are less expensive or cheaper, it doesn't mean they're better, the quality of the copper and the bypass and the flows are nowhere near the Dragon Breath Heaters.

Are you looking for the perfect solution to heat up your house or a non-conventional space that you use? Give us a call and ask for a quote on Dragon Breath Air Handler, today!

And if you have a dragon breath air handler, please send us your pictures and comments. We'd like to post them. We have a lot of happy customers out there and we want to pass that information on.