Surgemaster treatment

mgmine

I am looking for something to put in the boiler instead of skimming it or in conjunction to skimming it. Has anyone used this product and if so do you recommend it? I saw another thread on tablets by the same company but they don't seem to do the same thing.



<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rectorseal-68742-5-3-Ounce-Surgemaster-Treatment/dp/B008A3UEP0/ref=sr_1_3?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1352912316&sr=1-3&keywords=steam+boiler">http://www.amazon.com/Rectorseal-68742-5-3-Ounce-Surgemaster-Treatment/dp/B008A3UEP0/ref=sr_1_3?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1352912316&sr=1-3&keywords=steam+boiler</a>

nicholas bonham-carter

boiler additives

if you have a white shirt with a dirty collar, what would be best to do:

1. spray white paint on the collar?

2. wash the shirt?

skimming is always better.--nbc

Sil

Funny...

but true...

gerry gill

Boiler chemicals are an aid,

not a substitute.

Hap_Hazzard

Tap water isn't always ideal.

Water without additives is not an option. Water loves to dissolve stuff. Before the rain even hits the ground it has dissolved oxygen and other atmospheric gases and a variety of airborne pollutants. It becomes slightly to moderately acidic, which helps it to leach minerals from the soil, rock, concrete and other materials it runs off and percolates through on its way to the water table. Then it mixes with other sources in various aquifers in the phreatic zone and eventually makes its way to a water treatment plant where it is chlorinated, aerated, treated with coagulants and flocculants, sedimented and filtered, and then chlorinated some more and sent on its way to you. Depending on where you live, your water can have all kinds of different additives in it before you even turn on the tap, and they're not all good for you or your boiler.



I'm not one for mindlessly pouring anything that comes in a bottle that says "for boilers" into my boiler, but assuming that nothing you can add to the water will do it any good is just as mindless. If Gerry has been using this stuff, and it's doing good things for his customers' boilers, that's got my attention. I'm not ready to assume it will help me--I'm not on the same water supply--but that doesn't mean he's wrong. He's just got ahold of a different part of the elephant.



If you're satisfied with how clean your water is, that's great, but if other people are taking the same steps as you and they're not satisfied, they probably have a tougher problem, and unless you can bottle up some of your water and send it to them, they're not going to get the same results without treating the water they've got.

mgmine

Very hard water... KEK maybe?

I'm on a well and the water is very very hard, in addition there are a lot of dissolved minerals in it. We have a water softener but have to add so much salt that when things dry there is a white film on them. If the softener is off it is even whiter. The last boiler lasted about 10 years so I was hoping to find some magic pill to help things out. I read on this site an article about KEK, I'm looking for anything that will help. I will skim it but that won't help the new water that goes in. 

Hap_Hazzard

A couple of ideas.

First of all, you should be using water that hasn't been through the water softener. The hard water will produce scale, but it's not as hard on a boiler as the salt. There are a couple of things you might try to reduce the scale without introducing salt into the water.



Since the volume of water you need isn't that much, you could run your water through a reverse-osmosis water softener. These use selectively permeable membranes to remove most of the ions from the water, but you need to remove them from the membrane by rinsing, so this wastes a lot of water if you're doing it for your whole water supply, but at the amount you need for the boiler it wouldn't be too bad. Also, I don't think you'd want to remove all of the ions--you want the boiler water to be alkaline--so you might want to use half softened water and half unsoftened. There might be some ultrafiltration units that will give you the right solution, but you would have to investigate that option.



But before you go to all that expense, give those Steamaster tablets a try. They contain a chelating agent that should sequester the metal cations and prevent them from forming scale. Most people have found they don't need to use as much as the instructions say to use, so I think the best approach is to add them gradually, like maybe one a day, until you see improvement. The worst that can happen is it might make things worse and you'll have to drain and re-fill the boiler.

mgmine

Thanks

Thanks for the info, I see that the tablets and the Surgemaster are different although do some similar things.I do have a surging problem that has created all sorts of problems, even with over $300 dollars in new vents I still don't have very much heat on one main. I'm grasping for straws on anything that might help. How would I get the tablets in? For that matter anything in? I thought about adding an elbow to the skimming fitting to pour stuff in but a tablet wouldn't fit though and a power would go in either.