Best Of
Re: Boiler Replacement Sizing Question
Do not go larger than an EG-40.
If it was mine id probably go EG-35.
Re: Weil-McLain WGO with RIELLO burner?
All three of them are good burners. I am not fond of Riellos myself but they are good burners. It's the parts they use I don't care for but that is just me. Most people love them.
Re: First time doing heat load calc: Whoa, is my boiler 2x oversized?
As a point of reference, I maintain a 4-unit condo building in the Boston suburbs. We have two WGO-5 boilers that burn a total of about 1200 gals/yr, which happens to be almost exactly double your consumption rate. I've calculated our building heat loss 4 different ways, 3 of which used actual oil consumption or boiler run times at known outdoor temps, and all the heat loss numbers agree within 10%, so I have high confidence in them. Our heat loss is 90,000 BTU/hr, and since the math is basically linear, by comparison your heat loss (in a similar HDD zone) would be half, since you consume half the amount of oil. Which puts your heat loss at 45,000 BTU/hr, quite close to the 50,000 BTU/hr that @EBEBRATT-Ed predicted earlier.
We also have massively oversized boilers, and I plan on downsizing to WGO-2's when the time comes. But since you say you're doing the install and weight matters, you might want to look at the Biasi B10/3 or B10/4. Those are around 300 pounds, much smaller and easier to wrangle than the 800-pound monster UO-3. I do not have any experience with the Biasi, but I have done some reading on it in the course of looking for alternatives to our WGO-5's. There are a number of people here who have experience with Biasi's, and there are a number of threads discussing their reliability, etc.
The downside of the Biasi is that the plumbing is all different from your existing WGO setup, so if you can wrassle a new WGO in there like @EdTheHeaterMan said, that would be simpler plumbing-wise.
Re: Replacing Near Boiler Piping with Drop Header
How old is your SGO-7?
If it was mine and it is heating well (sounds like it is) I would leave it as is. It won't save you any money on fuel and you can probably spend the money better on pipe insulation and tightening up the house. If and when you have to replace the boiler that would be the time to re-pipe. We see many boilers that are "piped wrong" and "shouldn't work" but they do. If it is steaming well and the water level is not bouncing or surging, and there is no water hammer I would leave it as is.
How does the size of the boiler compare to your connected EDR of the radiation?
Re: Logamatic Alternative
The Buderus distributors by me offer the Hydrostat 3250 Plus. If you're lucky, you can get one in Buderus Blue. You'll also need to change the well. Actually, make sure you specify what boiler you have because well insertion depth is critical. If the system already has an external LWCO, you don't need the Hydrostat Electrowell, but redundancy never hurt anyone.
Re: First time doing heat load calc: Whoa, is my boiler 2x oversized?
A simple cheap blower door test WILL show where the cheapest and highest return on investments can be made.
Re: Electrical - heating question
The NEC disconnect can be a switch on/near, at least in-sight-of, the equipment. Most burner instructions (and every burner tech I met) require a disconnect within reach of the service side.
Re: First time doing heat load calc: Whoa, is my boiler 2x oversized?
After lots of measuring and calculating and filling out the form I got about 70,000 btus/hr. So now I've pinpointed my desired energy capacity to exactly precisely somewhere between 30,000 (fuel bill method) and 70,000 btus (this method)
yeah this is exactly why you should not calculate it by the assembly lol. Way too inaccurate to use for someone who’s doing it for the first time. Why not just trust what actually happened? Otherwise you’re relying on a bunch of guesswork.
Regardless, you know what to do now. Reach out to some contractors and good luck!
Re: UPS26-150F speed shaft broke
do you need to be able to change the speed? If not just wire the speed you want and skip the switch
Re: Honeywell VisonPro 8000 cycles per hour
No, that kind of rapid cycling isn't normal. If it was the thermostat switching on and off even though it reached the setpoint, that isn't normal either. Something got badly confused…
There are some steam systems which seem to work better on 2 cycles per hour, so you could try that. 3 cycles per hour may be too short a cycle to get heat to some of the slower radiators.