Best Of

Are you very familiar with your system or is it a new house for you? How long have you owned it and how has it been operating for you? If my returns in my 100 year old single pipe system were clear like yours I don't think I would be doing it at all, or maybe just check monthly for a while and if they were still clear, check every few months etc. You only need to remove a very small amount to check.

Definitely do pH control. I am using Rectorseal 8-way at up to 2 oz. per gallon. I'm trying to keep my pH between 9.5 and 10 but I have an improperly piped boiler with copper which can corrode at higher pH and I have near boiler piping issues that make me prone to wet steam/carryover so I especially want to avoid higher pH which could cause foaming, especially with the rust particulates I get.

I don't think anybody should really tell you not to remove a few thimblefuls of water from your sight glass when it looks as muddy as that (edit - after watching your video that water was super clear compared to mine), at least without knowing what the TSS (total suspended solids) reading is as well as how your boiler tends to operate with respect to: does the sight glass surge up and down, does it plummet too low during steaming, etc.. Once you get TSS up around 30 to 50 ppm you are getting in the danger zone for wet steam/carryover and over 50 would be high risk. It all depends upon how your system behaves and how good of an installation it is. Since you have a two pipe vapor system maybe it is much more well behaved than my single pipe system is. OK to drain a smidge now and then from the sight glass to make sure it is reading correctly but it is better for getting sludge and particulates out, to drain from the boiler drain down lower, and with a full port drain valve rather than the crummy one the boiler comes with.

Does your makeup water come from the hot side of your water heater? Because that should be less full of air than cold tap water would be. I use preboiled distilled water for makeup water but I am learning that too pure water can cause problems for some people if their whole boiler is filled with it due to too low TDS possibly causing explosive super heated boiling which can contribute to surging and possibly wet steam/carryover. Should be in the range of 1000 to 2000 ppm. Probably depends upon how excellent their near boiler piping is as well. I think it is working fine for me to use all distilled water but that could be because my boiler is 21 years old and has scale or something, that may be adding to TDS. I need to get a TDS meter.

Oh and I watched your video. How often are you checking the LWCO? Weekly? What is your procedure? If you are draining that much water and putting the same amount of hot tap water back into the boiler, then you most definitely will be adding too much fresh oxygenated untreated water. I hear some people on youtube like Mikey Pipes saying to do that monthly, but they just let the water feeder add fresh water to fill back up. I think that's insane, in general, and depending upon the particulars, like is there an extreme TSS problem from the piping etc...

I think I'd recommend a Magnehelic to anyone that wants a better gauge. They really seem to handle abuse well.

They seem to tolerate vacuum fine, even if they're not a combination pressure / vacuum version.

Here's mine showing a decent vacuum shutting down. The smaller gauge above it is a Dwyer 8-0-16"WC gauge. I think it's a LPG4-D9122N

Turns out the one I got several years ago has no brand name on it and is made in Taiwan (edit to add - Kodiak Controls KC25, was $30 in 2014, now $39). I made my pressuretrol/gauge tree with a cross in the middle for cleaning out with an air compressor and a large cable tie when I don't feel like going the full monty and disassembling for better cleaning. I can install a second gauge or a manometer there temporarily for finding out what's what with this gauge.