Well Thanks guys for providing me with a wide variety of vender's to browse through. Wow, I had no idea there so many out there! But of all of them Sarracenia Northwest( www.cobraplant.com) had the most, and the best information about these amazing plant's! These guys specialize in growing, and caring for these plants. And after asking them several questions about there site, and about there plants, they always responded with fast, and friendly replies! They actually care about not only what they sale, but there customers! In my emails I told them that I was new to growing these plants, and also about the growing location I was wanting to have it in, so they suggested that I try one of the highland verity's (N.Truncata or N. ventricosa) to start with. So I went ahead and ordered the N.Truncata, and this is the plant they shipped to me.:p http://i25.tinypic.com/34fd17r.jpg I have had the plant for about a week now, and so far it is doing very well! As you can see in the pic the plant is just a baby. I know from what I have read about this species that it takes two years for them to reach maturity. But I was wondering will I see a lot of growth through the upcoming Spring, and Summer months? I also ordered a VFT (Dionaea muscipula) at the same time. I was supposed to get one plant, but it looks like there are like five plant's in one container! So it should make a nice full pot come this summer! I have the plant outdoors in full sun, and it has already been covered in snow ones, and in temps below freezing sense I have had it, but is doing very well non the less. Overall I am very pleased, and excited with my order from Sarracenia Northwest, and with there fast shipping! I will definitely be getting more from these guys before to long! ;p Thanks again for the info!

Our house has a similar situation. It's 1900 sf, built in the 1890's, has some blown in insulation in the walls (we only know this because we gutted the bathroom and found it - this room will have regular batt insulation in the walls and ceilings), has the original windows but triple track storms. The old oil fired boiler is 199k BTU and our oil bills are completely heinous - we used about $650 worth of oil for the month of December. I can't imagine what our bills would have been for a house 50% larger. Just from a reality check standpoint, there is no way a house the size of ours requires the absolutely largest residential boiler available (there may be some slightly larger but in general, around 200k is as big as they get). Our old boiler does short cycle too, it's loud enough that you can hear it. Even in the dead of winter with single digits at night it cycles on and off. We are probably running somewhere in the 60-70% efficiency range also. Everyone who has quoted for us has universally said "WHOA that's a HUGE boiler for your house." After evaluating all of our options, we are going with a modulating/condensing boiler at about half the capacity (maximum) and putting zones into our house. Right now when it is 68 downstairs, it's about 80 degrees in our bedroom - so at a minimum breaking the house down into different zones for upstairs and downstairs should also help - DH works at home during the day and there is no reason to throw all of that extra heat upstairs when no one is there in order to keep downstairs comfortable. For various reasons we are actually going with more zones than that (the way our system was originally piped makes it extremely easy - labor wise it would be just as much to combine them back into one zone as leave them split - and there is a big temperature difference between the various parts of the house we are splitting off) but you might want to check into whether it is possible given your current piping to separate your 2nd floor from your first into separate zones. Between the zoning and the much more efficient boiler, we hope to slash our energy prices. It's NOT a cheap boiler (the cost of the boiler is more than the cost of your boiler + install) but with our old cast iron radiators with relatively cool return, the condensing part will work great, and with us zoning out our house, the modulating part should work great too (it operates at a much lower BTU if the demand isn't there). It also changes the temperature of the water sent out into the system based on the outside temperature, so if it's 50 degrees outside and we want to maintain say 70 inside, it's not necessarily moving 180-190 degree water through the system, so there is savings there too, especially in the shoulder months. We are switching from oil to gas (it would cost us thousands to replace our oil tanks, the real reason we are replacing the boiler - the oil tanks are not long for this world and because there is no longer outside access to the basement it would be a huge job to get the old ones out in pieces and multiple small new ones in and we decided to put that money into a more energy efficient boiler rather than use the same old boiler and just get new oil tanks) so it will be interesting to see the difference in our energy bills. Anyway it took a ton of research and a bunch of time looking at our system and figuring out what was going on to trace out the various loops we have, but I'm glad we put the time into it. We feel confident with the system we have chosen and hope our house will be far more comfortable and energy efficient for the years to come. Energy prices have nowhere to go but up, unfortunately. We are only planning to do this once so figured we'd do it right the first time. The first couple of contractors wanted to put in either a 200k btu boiler to replace the one we have or a 165kbtu boiler calculated by counting radiator fins. As I said before, some of our radiators have about 3x the capacity actually required for comfort in the room so it's kind of silly to oversize in this way because it's just easier to "replace in kind."

When faced with replacing my old Hydrotherm boiler and conventional high recovery water heater I went with the most efficient system available. I installed a Triangle Tube prestige solo boiler and a Smart 40 indirect water heater. In our area outdoor resets are going to be required and the Utility company had a cash rebate of $700 on the boiler and $210 on the water heater. The federal govt. gave us a $150 tax credit. This is a condensing modulating boiler that under certain conditions is 95% efficient. When we are not home the water heater may cycle once during the course of the day to reheat the water. I have a Taco zone controller with 4 pumps plus a pump for the indirect. Zone valves could have been used, but I wanted the separate pumps so if one went out the rest of the house would still get heat. It is hard to say how much gas we saved this winter because it was a mild winter. With the outdoor reset the house is much more comfortable on mild days in that the water is heated only to a certain temperature based on the outdoor temp. This is a stainless boiler and not a mass (cast iron) boiler. I know of 3 in operation for years and little or no problems with any of them. This system is used in our area a lot, but maybe not in yours. They are direct vent with pvc piping so that may be an issue for your install. They also require a drain for condensed moisture. I will have to wait for a severe winter to see how much gas is really saved but so far it is working in my favor.

Wow, that looks like a museum piece. It is a real beauty, I might add! Surf on over to the boiler fora at Terrylove.com and heating help.com. There are several knowledgeable boiler people that post there. Try to get some btu numbers and any other numbers off the boiler plate. it can be difficult to retrofit modern boilers to older systems, but I'd guess that is not going to be a problem here. You do have relatively low heat needs in your climate for that size house so the biggest problem might be finding a small enough boiler. Note that lower temperature water that might be an advantage for efficiency might not be possible because the radiators might not heat well enough at those temperatures. If you've had a lot of insulation and other upgrades since the house was built, it might well be OK. Do you have cast iron radiators? Seriously consider bringing the other 340 sq into the radiant heat system. (How is that heated now?) If you want to do this right, be prepared to shop hard for someone that knows boilers and retrofitting them into old homes. You might consider installing an HTP Phoenix water heater (or the rebadged Westinghouse version) with a heat exchanger as a combination appliance to provide heat and hot water with an added flat plate heat exchanger to separate the two systems.