Best Of

Something that has been mentioned on here a few times is that wet steam causes problems with radiator vents.

Wouldn't any steam entering a radiator automatically end up very wet by the time it gets to the vent just from the nature of a condenser?

I voted.

When it comes to heating boilers and carry over, either improper piping, too high of a water level in the boiler, or dirty water causes it.

If you close a valve and let pressure build in the boiler and then dump it open it'll also suck water out.

Spirax Sarco has some good videos showing this in steam boilers. Though they're not low pressure heating boilers, I suspect the behavior is much the same. You can see the water being sucked up into the supply

https://youtu.be/dorhr85ASRM?si=E12tjme0CHVaMXog&t=37

This appears to be from someone else, but also has an excellent view of carry over occurring.

https://youtu.be/tI3tWuSsX7c?si=cL45aUDJcVWgMGLY&t=148

You're not missing anything. Venting is the key to balancing any system with one pipe steam heat.

What you need to do is to take a look around the basement first, and see if there are any main vents on the steam mains. If there aren't, figure out where you might place them.

Now I'm going to be that this building is fairly tall in relation to its footprint. And therefore, to really improve distribution, the risers are as important as the mains in the basement — and you need to take a look at them and see if, and where, you might put main vents on the risers before the radiator connections. This alone will speed steam getting to the upper apartments, and make balancing them much easier. If you can post some pictures of the piping near the tops of the risers, we can suggest ways to do this.

Next thing is to slow down the vents on the radiators in areas which get too hot, or too hot too fast. This is a rather fiddly job, as changing a few vents in one place will affect the heat in other places, so it's something of a try and see what happens and then try again.

Don't worry about changing the thermostat, at least not yet.

I think the two pumps is when you use a storage tank without a coil. The black pump moves flow through the external plate heat exchanger and the tank.

Hope he catches a mouse😉

Why the blocks? There's no downside to having more margin on the B dimension and a lot of issues with not having enough.

If you're worried about waterline height due to existing wet returns, install a false waterline.

Look into fixing the infiltration first.