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lowering firing rate

JW_8
JW_8 Member Posts: 5
in THE MAIN WALL
The homeowner on our current project is complaining about high oil usage.

They had a Burnham KV88 connected to 632EDR of steam radiators.

The system short cycles and we were thinking of lowering the firing rate to save oil.

Is there a graph somewhere showing the interaction of firing rate on steam production for a given boiler size? Any advice or rules of thumb for this sort of problem?

Thanks for the help!

Comments

  • Greg Maxwell
    Greg Maxwell Member Posts: 212
    Burnham Boiler

    If Im not mistaken, that is about a 250,000btu boiler, and its on a 150,000btu job. Thats really too bad. While there are no rules of thumb on something like this, I can tell you that it is going to be dependant on the type, and model of burner you have. Please consult Burnham on that for minimum firing rate. I suppose you could put a smaller burner in there, and cut your firing rate that way, but also check with Burnham on that as they would probably be the ones to advise you. You may be able to eliminate short cycling, but the result after a lot of time and money will be that the customer still has to build steam, it will just take longer, and may have the same fuel consumption in the end. Its not like it is just slightly oversized.

    Good luck
  • JW_8
    JW_8 Member Posts: 5
    lowering firing rate

    Thanks for that. That confirms what we were thinking. How is it that the "last guy who was here" is always the problem?We're going to advise a new boiler at the correct size as all that fidgeting with the burner won't really get us anywhere.
  • icesailor
    icesailor Member Posts: 7,265
    Saving Money (Lowering Firing Rate)

    This still fits in my creed, "It's amazing how much money you can save by doing it wrong the first time." Only in this case, doing it right would have saved money by using the correctly sized boiler in the first place.

    The installer probably didn't make any profit because if he isn't knowledgeable enough to know what he is doing in his job, he doesn't belong in business and probably has the same business sense for running the business as he has for actually pricing and doing the work.

    Either way, the homeopwner gets screwed and someone that knows how to do it properly, didn't get a job.

    My other creed, "There's never enough time to do it right but there's always time for someone else to do it over.
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