gas/oil steam boiler?

David Sutton_6

A heat loss must be done, or at least have the rad measured and the sq.ft done to determine the proper size of the boler, Name tag reading and a good guess dosn't do the job anymore.

As far as gas goes, you can use a oil block boiler and a powerflame burner , if the need to change back to oil comes you can just change the burner, keep the tank where it is,
Gas price WILL be going up

Hollis

gas/oil steam boiler?

Is there such a thing that can be switched without too much trouble or is there so much compromise in engineerings that its not practical/done?
If so any recommendations?
CAN a gas steam boiler be fairly efficient?

Ron Feldman

Oil -> Gas and boiler sizing

We are in the process of getting quotes to convert our oil steam heating system to a gas steam heating system. The beginning of the year we were able to get a number of quotes and the boiler sizes were between 175,000 btu to 200,000.

Today someone came over and told my wife that we do not need so many btu's because it will waste energy and end up costing us more money to heat the house. He said the current boiler is only 130,000Btu's and it was designed to be a hot water heater also. Since we have a hot water heater he feels we will only need either 130,000 BTUs or 140,000.

I am not sure who to believe. Any thoughts?

Al Gregory_3

You need to measure the rads and piping and go by that.

Unknown

Here's how...

http://www.heatinghelp.com/newsletter.cfm?Id=130

Steamhead (in transit)

Sure there is

but it's not as simple as flipping a switch.

You're looking for a wet-base boiler that can accept an oil burner or a power gas burner. Furthermore, you want both burners to be available from the factory so there's no guesswork.

The Smith 8 series is the only residential steam boiler I know of that answers all of the above. It's available from the factory with Beckett, Carlin and Riello oil burners as well as the Carlin EZ-Gas power burner (called the G-8 in this configuration). You do lose just a bit of efficiency on gas, but the result is still about 6% better thermal efficiency than the typical atmospheric gas boiler (this is before AFUE is calculated).

Changing over one of these boilers involves cleaning the boiler if needed, replacing the burner, the draft regulator and a couple other items, and setting everything up with a digital analyzer. This is a job for a pro, but is a lot less involved and expensive than replacing the entire boiler!

Here are a couple G-8 installations we've done.

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