Best Of
Re: Question about gas valve placement on the main inside a house, allowed or not?
most of the plumbing and mechanical codes refer you to NFPA 54 for fuel gas practices and component approval. The local AHJ can add additional requirements as @Mad Dog_2 mentioned.
hot_rod
Re: Question about gas valve placement on the main inside a house, allowed or not?
some gas utilities use a gas cock that can be turned off with a tool, aka Cresent wrench, but cannot be turned back on without a special tool. There is a pin on the backside that needs to depress. I think Michigan requires this type of valve at the meter.
hot_rod
Re: Question about gas valve placement on the main inside a house, allowed or not?
Each valve adds more pressure drop. You don't need an isolation valve on the building to keep the water from running back when you remove the meter like you do on a water service. Gas valves don't really corrode and fail the way water valves do.
mattmia2
Re: Question about gas valve placement on the main inside a house, allowed or not?
A full port valve at the lower arrow would be on the line pressure side and would add little if any restriction to the flow to the meter or your building
I would think the utility should require one there to service their meter. Assuming that all belongs to the gas provider?
hot_rod
Re: Question about gas valve placement on the main inside a house, allowed or not?
i never understood the main gas shutoff requiring a tool to shut off, but there is a gas cock on the line just inside the foundation and another after the regulator.
mattmia2
Re: Question about gas valve placement on the main inside a house, allowed or not?
With the recent Task 87 gas rules, it's a game changer for even touching gas cocks before and around a gas meter. No more just shutting the first gas cock & changing an appliance or gas branch or riser cock. Mad Dog
Re: Question about gas valve placement on the main inside a house, allowed or not?
In the recent past, a simple Master Plumber license allowed you to work on everything after the HP regulator. Mad Dog
Re: Question about gas valve placement on the main inside a house, allowed or not?
this is typically what you see upstream of a meter, with a lock tab. It is a full port NG rated valve
Oddly enough the G in WOG was non flammable gas
hot_rod
Re: Boiler feed pumps options
The quick and cheap fix would be to install a square head plug cock in each pumps discharge line to throttle the pumps flow to what is necessary for each boiler. If these were large boilers there are a few better but more expensive ways to control the pumps flow. This will get you "out of the woods" as we say in my area.
Re: Packing Heat
The next step would be to look at your gas bills and find the month with the highest therm usage. Then look up insolation for your location for that month, and average high temperature for your location for your month. Figure out what kind of thermal collector you would like to use, and calculate its efficiency at that outdoor temperature, and figure out how many panels you'll need to produce the heat equivalent of that number of therms, at that insolation and efficiency.
That gives a lower limit on the size of a thermal system, you'd still need some sort of storage. But you can compare that to the PV size estimated above to get a ballpark of how competitive it will be.
