Dirty Water

ddog777

I have a Weil McClain steam furnace which powers a gravity return system, that is entering it's third heating season. Last season it performed flawlessly, however firing up about a week ago, the water in the gauge glass is very muddy I've flushed it several times in the last week, until the water is running clear, but on the next startup, the gauge clouds over immediately. Are there any tricks to properly flusshing out all this sludge?  Are chemicals  recommended. I would appreciate any and all comments and suggestions



Thaanks

Hap_Hazzard

By The Standells?

The source of the crud isn't the boiler. It's the wet return. Thanks to a safety feature called the Hartford loop, condensate returns to the boiler just below the water line--several inches above the end of the wet return. That means most, if not all, of the wet return remains full of water--at least during heating season--all year if you don't drain it.



So your wet return is a sizable reservoir of stagnant water. And filth. When you turn that nice, clean water in your newly-flushed boiler into steam, after it condenses in your radiators, it has to go through this bad neighborhood to get home again. You'd look dirty too if you had to go through that a couple times. :-)



If there is a drain valve at the bottom of your Hartford loop, go ahead and drain it. If not I'd advise you to suffer through until Spring. Those pipes get well rusted, making them hard to take apart and easy to break, especially at the joints, and you don't need a headache like that right now.



Some chemicals are useful for cleaning a boiler, but you can't get them into the wet return unless you have a place to pour them into it. If you could do that you could probably flush some water through the pipes to rinse out the sediment, which would do more good than any chemical you could add. But if you don't have a drain valve or a port to flush it out, you now have a little project for next summer.

ddog777

dirty water

Thanks hap, fortunately  I do have a drain on the Hartford loop, and have drained that as well as the boiler, Guess I'll keep on draining