steam heat

mak

I looked at a system in Englewood NJ ,it has two air handlers with radiators in duct work each with its own t-stat. 1st floor , one room has C.I. baseboard, 2nd has column rads.total of 3 t-stats. Homeowner complaint, boiler runs almost non stop. Not sure if anything can be done to fix this system.

bob young

load

check load. boiler might be undersized & cannot catch up to satisfy.

ttekushan_3

3 stats

control zone valves, I presume. After doing your edr measurement and determining total boiler output required, you might well find that the boiler is large enough to heat either the cast iron zones OR the air handler at any one time. In this case, use any available auxiliary contacts on the air handler zone valve to close the valves serving the cast iron zones or vice versa depending on what is the highest priority.

The point is, if the boiler can't produce enough steam to satisfy all the zones, it can turn out like this, with the boiler running all the time. If, on the other hand, the steam is channelled only to zones it can handle at one time, the radiation will get very hot and heat the space up. There's a good chance that the boiler will spend much less total time running.

Also, is the air handler supposed to run all the time, or is there any indication that is was used on some kind of a schedule for make up air heating? Without further info its hard to make guesses.

All of the preceding assumes that all steam traps and vents in the system are working properly. You can't have bad steam traps and leaking/clogged vents (or missing vents) and expect any efficiency at all.

Give us more info and we should be able to get the system to run nicely.

-Terry