slow baseboard steam heat

john_216

We recently renovated a 7x13 room. I asked the plumber to replace the cast iron radiator with baseboard steam. He put in 10 feet on one wall and made a 90 degree turn and connected another 6 feet on the adjacent wall with a separate return pipe to directly to the boiler and a #1 gorton on the end of the baseboard run and another one at the end of the return pipe run. With this I only get about 8 to 10 feet of heat from the begining run of baseboard, depending on the length of the heating cycle and how much I slow down a big radiator in an adjacent room. I thought of separating the two lengths, connecting the second run to the steam main and eliminating the return pipe.

nicholas bonham-carter

New baseboard

Did the original cast iron radiator work properly?

Basebord radiators behave differently than cast iron, and thus the area served by baseboard will usually be colder. The difference is in the amount of thermal mass of the cast iron being high, and needing only to be heated up once an hour or so; whereas the baseboard needs a constant flow of steam to be hot.

There also seems to be a venting or supply capacity problem on this line. Is the pipe supplying the baseboard capable of providing enough btu's of steam to heat up the Basebord?

You might set the thermostat to its maximum to see if the total length will get hot, and what the time delay is.

Hope you have not thrown the old rad out!--NBC

john_216

slow baseboard steam heat

The pipe feeding this line is either 1 1/4" or 1 1/2" . I can't tell for sure since I'm measuring outside diameter. But the adjacent room's rad has also the same size pipe. Our boiler is 35 yrs old. The plumber says it works fine and produces 90000 btu's on output. I didn't throw out the old rad. It's sitting in the back yard. The way it is now  the baseboard does heat the room adequately. But all that wasted baseboard! That's why I thought of separating the two sections and feed steam to them separately.