Best Of

Well, Happy New Year 2021 is coming and so will less stress ,hopefully. I was sitting here trying to think of a funny story because we do serious everyday. This is a tale from my early years, very early. The year was 1956 and I was the ripe old age of 5 ,almost time to leave home. I have never in my long life met people who could make life worst for themselves better than my parents. We were Irish prattle diggers and that’s where would should have stayed. The old man at that time was working at Sheas brewery as a helper in the electrical shop ,so we had, oh ,zero money. The old man and my mother came up with a guaranteed money maker, we were going to buy a chicken farm and get rich selling eggs. There were only two problems ;we didn’t know the first thing about chickens, and living on a farm means you are going to spend more money than you would in town. Well, the summer went okay , the chickens were pretty unhappy but they’d get used to it. This country back before global warming got cold in the middle of October and stayed cold until the end of April. The fall arrived and guess what ,we didn’t have enough money to fill the coal bunker, not a dime. We had an old gravity hot air furnace and it was fired on coal and well those lousy coal yards wanted money for their coal,wankers. We were in shall we say ,a cold position.The old man took the shovel by the handle and told my mother one of the old chicken huts was going to be our path to preventing chilblains. He tears the hut down and cuts all the lumber into stove lengths. My job, after all I was five, was to pile the crap in the basement, crap will become a major theme in this tale. The old man was loading the furnace three times a day ,wood is a much poorer fuel than coal. Things went well for awhile even though the house was a little on the cold side until we got down to the interior boards of the hut. Chickens,for whatever reason, didn’t use the toilet they just let it go ,so the boards had a coating of ,shall we say, organic goodness. Well it was December and that was a cold year, the temperature was at a steady 25 or lower so we were going through wood. Finally, we hit the juicy boards and the old man fills the furnace at 4 in the morning. Luckily, it was Saturday so my mother didn’t have to weather the storm ,so to speak. The back door was hammered off the hinges about 9 that morning and our neighbor from the other farm was asking the old man if we were using chemical warfare the whole prairie stank for five miles around. It would seem ,chicken manure and the process of combustion was an aroma all of its own. I went outside with the old man and the aggrieved farmer and the smoke from the chimney was a dirty brown colour and it smelled, well, like a burning chicken hut. The old man was always a diplomatic Irish redneck and he told the guy to do something sexually impossible and stomped back into the house. Things were not going well ,the chickens were legs up frozen solid , who knew they couldn’t take 40 below, and the neighbours were getting up a burn an Irishman before Xmas gang. The day was saved, we were down to about three days of “ friendly” boards , the neighbours had the gibbet erected for the old man, when my grandmother lent my parents money for a load of coal. True to form ,my old man burned the boards to the scraps because the neighbours could all go to hell. What a Xmas ,60 legs up chickens, people lining up in the yard yelling for the old mans blood and December 23 a load of coal delivered by my old mans brother, he worked for the coal yard. Thinking back I still laugh, believe or not ,things only got worse, but at my age it was just another adventure. Stay Well and Be Blessed Jack

Thank you for your posts, everyone - quite a flurry of activity!

For reference, this is an EK2 Frontier with a gas burner (up to 225,000 BTU/hr input).

In addition to the proper expansion tank, primary/secondary should definitely be used to pipe this system properly; this needs to be corrected. I talked to our tech support team and we PM'd @ssa with the correct primary/secondary drawings earlier today, but I didn't have a chance to catch up until now.

I know @EzzyT and @clammy have visited and reviewed @ssa 's installation and I have every confidence that they will propose a proper solution. I'm sure they also reviewed and traced the piping, and being on site goes a long way toward understanding and proposing the correct solution vs stitching together and tracing piping and the system overall in photos (although you did a remarkable job, @ssa !).

Also for reference, we do track every boiler serial number and the respective dealer that purchased it - all 41 years of history. If the dealer or homeowner registered the product, then we also have that information.

We are here to help if any support is needed or desired going forward.

Best,
Roger