Best Of
Re: Wet Steam
or a takeoff that is too small or someone trying to use baseboard on 1 pipe steam.
unless your house is 212f+ eventually the steam is going to turn in to water somewhere
if your system is parallel flow, do the returns get hot before the runnounts and mains really start heating?
mattmia2
Re: Wet Steam
I have a Peerless 63-04L that was very poorly installed by previous owner and I suspect it was with the help of my neighbor/plumber up the street but I can't prove that (lol). Among other things, the Hartford Loop is right at the NWL instead of min. 2 in. below, and the header is less than 24 in. above the NWL and is copper and the boiler is not level but is much higher at the flue end than the front panel end. Many more issues…. Anyway, it is very sensitive to water quality or it will carryover, sometime spectacularly to the point where one particular radiator on the 1st floor will spit water out of the vents.
One of the first clues that it is getting to be time to flush the boiler and that carryover is starting again is that the low pressure gauge will start to show a small amount of pressure very early on in the cycle when boiling has just begun. That is because of the slug of water that is going up into the header causing back pressure. Should just see the needle bouncing slightly on zero peg when all is well. I will also see the water drop in the sight glass further on in the cycle to well below the NWL, fully exposing the Hartford Loop, which is a no no. You could calculate how much steam volume it should take to fill your radiators and mains and the water volume equivalent of that and that is the most you should ever see your sight glass go down, barring some sort of tilting waterline issues, which I probably do have with my bad install because I will see my waterline actually go up when the boiler water is freshly cleaned when boiling is imminent and before steaming (single riser used on near boiler piping and it is the one nearest the sight glass). It goes up lots more than would be happening with expansion due to temperature. When it is carrying over badly this never happens so I don't mind seeing it happen.
I suggest installing a full port ball valve drain valve on the boiler and draining it through that. Then back flush it (several gallons maybe until it appears at bottom of sight glass) by hooking up a hose to that and drain again and keep repeating that maybe 5 times or so until the drain water is pretty clear. I then fill it with preboiled distilled water treated with 2 oz. of Rectorseal 8-way per gallon. That's more than they say on the label. I shoot for pH 9.5 to 10.0. That should give me pretty consistently excellent performance for the entire season but the pipes and radiators are 100 years old and very dirty.
I plan to start draining 1 to 2 gallons every month or so and putting fresh preboiled distilled treated with the 8-way to see if I can improve the season long performance that way by keeping the intra season particulates down a bit more.
Wet steam is very real and residential steam boiler systems are not somehow immune to that. It is simply saturated steam with entrained water droplets (ie. two phase mixture). The more liquid water present the wetter it is. You will get a significant efficiency loss with that happening.
Re: Any Roth Oil Tank Downsides?
Just keep the suction 2-3" off the bottom when pumping into your new tank and get rid of that bottom stuff. I'm assuming the diesel in the tank is recent anyhow and not from 1987 or something? yes?
It's an oil furnace, not some super high pressure and $$ common rail diesel.
Myself, I'd just drain the old tank, weld the leak, refill and be done with it. But there's no way in heck I'd drop $3500 on a new tank! A regular 275 gal steel tank is around $1000… so not sure where another $2500 would be from.
nate379
Re: Removing a stubborn steam plug
I cannot pull the reducer fitting up. Won't budge.
I can ask my tenant below to access through his ceiling.
I've got a 12" and an 18" wrench. I'll give that route a try.
I recently moved a 2" CI steam pipe and I needed to put relief cuts in the couplings and hammer and chisel it out. The pipe threads were in good shape afterwards.
Regarding the water hammer... i disconnected a radiator yesterday and it had maybe 30 ounces of water in it because the pitch was terrible. But it never hammered. I thought water in the radiators made them hammer?
branimal
Re: Is Steam Heat still a Viable Option?
"Boiling the water uses a lot more energy than pumping it."
Yep, significantly more energy is needed to make steam vs hot water. Like 5x more.
I love my single pipe steam heated house from 1927. Brand new boiler. The warmth and the sounds that go along with that heat are very pleasant to me.
But if my system was 2-pipe steam, I long ago would have converted it to hot water for the efficiency alone.
Re: Can I run a spacepak heat pump system concurrently with my two-pipe steam boiler?
»and letting the boiler handle the base heating load«
Ideally one would downsize boiler and install orifices on radiator inlets? In many locations design temperature days are small fraction of heating season.
jumper
Replacement Hydronic system, cost of installation
I am replacing a single zone Weil Mclain VHE6 boiler. The system is radiators. I had an estimate from a local contractor which I term ridiculous but would like to get others opinion.
Estimate was for a Weil Mclain Evergreen 155. I priced it and all other needed parts conservatively at around $. The estimate was for $ meaning the labor was over $. This is NOT a complicated installation, and it was quoted it would take 1 day. This seems like a rip-off price. Your opinion?
Here is what the Internet says about this -
(Removed)
dsc3507
Re: Indirect water tank
Your GV90+ boiler operates at a lower cost per BTU than the oil boiler it replaced. Am I correct that the old oil boiler used a tankless coil for DHW, which proved problematic, leading to the addition of an electric water heater in 2021?
Most of your savings from switching to gas come from the GV90+ being a cold-start boiler. The old oil boiler likely maintained a minimum temperature for DHW even when hot water wasn’t being used. When a separate water heater is added, the oil boiler is often not converted to cold-start, so it continues wasting energy. Now you are using electricity—the most expensive fuel—to maintain DHW temperature.
I believe an indirect water heater would be a better solution. It’s a dedicated, well-insulated tank with no vent connection, reducing standby heat loss, and it uses the more efficient gas boiler as its heat source. An indirect tank can typically hold hot water for 16–20 hours with minimal temperature drop before needing to recover, whereas electric and vented gas or oil water heaters lose heat more quickly and often reheat every 4–5 hours.
In my opinion, based on over 40 years of oil and gas service and installation experience, indirect water heaters are the most efficient and reliable way to produce and store domestic hot water. Unless you are like @ethicalpaul and decide to install a heat pump electric water heater. I guess that will cost about the same as the Indirect job, but I'm not sure how long those tanks last. I don't believe that they have a lifetime tank warranty like my indirect does.
Re: riello f5 burner not firing
My money is on the fuel pump coupler being stripped out. Take the fuel pump back off and look at the inside of the coupler on the fuel pump side, and make sure it has the "D" shape inside, and not round. I have had a few of them do that.
Rick
