Home owner cleaned boiler questions.

LarryC

Wallies,

 

Home owner here.  I have an oil fired Peerless EC-05 cast iron beauty with a Beckett RWB gun model AFG.  It has a tankless coil and feeds 3 zones of copper baseboard.  It is located in the basement of a 1900's farmhouse in New Hampshire.

 

I moved and rewired the pump relays so I can now remove both the left side and the top to clean the boiler.  I used a piece of 3/8" all thread to scrape the hard soot off and a cleaning brush to remove most of the soot off of the pins.  I do not have a soot vacuum so I let all of the debris to fall into the fire chamber.

 

After scraping and brushing the soot off, I removed the gun and then the steel plate to gain access to the firing chamber.  By hand, I removed enough debris to fill up a 2 pound coffee can.  Most of the debris is a red powdery substance.  The white bricks on the three sides of the chamber were also coated with this red substance.  It came off easily with a brush and putty knife.  Some of the soft white material on the floor of the chamber also came out.

 

The gasket between the gun and mounting plate did not off cleanly and I lost a few pieces of it.  Part of the rope gasket between the plate and the boiler stuck and ripped.  I tried to place the rope gasket back in place and I think I got it OK.  When I fired up the boiler, a little puff of smoke or dust came out at the top of the mounting gasket for the gun.

 

Normally boiler runs on #2 heating oil.  Thanksgiving weekend I was out of town when we ran out of oil.  Helpful neighbor put in 15 gallons of kerosene to get us thru until Monday delivery.  He also replaced tank filter and gun filter screen because they were clogged.  Oil tank is probably 50 years old and probably contains interesting forms of life in it.

 

Boiler is located in a walk in dirt floor basement.  I brought outside combustion air in thru a 6 inch pipe to near the boiler.

 

QUESTIONS:

 

1)  Is this a normal quantity of debris for an oiled fired boiler that was serviced in March of 2010 ?

 

2) Service tag data: <strong>Draft</strong> -.04, <strong>Draft O.F.</strong> -.02, <strong>Smoke</strong> 0, <strong>Net Temp </strong>400, <strong>Efficiency</strong> 83%, <strong>Pressure</strong> 120, <strong>Pump screen</strong> B, <strong>Nozzle size</strong> 1.50, <strong>Nozzle angle</strong> 60, <strong>Nozzle pattern</strong> Hago B, <strong>Air</strong> 3 | 8

 

3) Is the red stuff normal?  There was alot of it.

 

 

Thanks

 

Larry

add

good job

everything sounds pretty normal.red stuff more then likely is some die from the oil .you definetely have all kind of bacteria in your tank ,which is normal for a tank that old.a little bit of kero never hurts.and the amount of debris also sounds pretty normal for house that old .all you need now is soot vac.