I never realized how completely awesome steam heat was.

Toymotorhead

Until we lost power for about 24 hours during the blizzard that just hammered the northeast with 27 inches of snow and ice and gusts to 70 MPH.



I quickly discovered that  I could fire up my generator for an hour and steam the system up fully, (which was taking almost an hour, since we are talking a 15-18 degree setback) and that couple of thousand pounds of 200 degree cast iron would keep my house livable for a long time. Liveable, not comfortable, but also pipes not freezing.  I only made 2 runs all day, and was about to do a 3rd, to coincide with getting some lights on to cook and eat dinner (and charge the cell phones again) when we got power back.



I thought that was pretty amazing for an old cold drafty 1875 house. And saved me a bunch on gas for the generator, and kept the wife and kid from going crazy.



I did also discover that I have a 2 more radiator valve stems to repack, and a few sputtery vents to change out. Running that long and building up to 20 oz. of pressure is pretty rare on my system.



I await for someone to tell me to convert to millivolt..........



Cheers

Hope everyone in the Northeast made it through that mess.

Richard.



 

ChrisJ

Yep

I have some parts to make a set of leads to connect to my car battery and run a tiny 120W inverter for if the power goes out.  That little inverter will run my atmospheric steam boiler for a long long time off of a car battery.



We also have a 4Kw generator but as you know running that all of the time is unecessary and costly.  To run that twice a day or so and have the heat going 24\7 is kind of nice.

Jamie Hall

The generator now and then bit

is what we do -- seems to work just fine.  Steam is pretty neat, isn't it?



We didn't lose power in the recent entertainment -- but we did get enough snow so that we are still only partly plowed out (that being one of the things a building super gets to do... no budget to hire a plow, and they'd make a mess of things anyway).

Toymotorhead

Inverter for backup.

I tried an inverter on my system, but it did not like the el-cheepo inverter that I have. I have on my wish list a pure sinewave inverter and a a couple of 55 amp hour AGM batteries, just for keeping the furnace on. Though I live in a town that has its own electric utility company, and they take care of their own and do a damn good job of it, they are hardcore on tree trimming, and big on maintenance, so power failures are fairly infrequent and short when they are, even during storms.



Cheers

Richard.

ChrisJ

El-cheapo

Hi Richard,



Not sure about your system but mine uses a 120 to 24V transformer so I can put in chopped AC without worry. The one I have claims it outputs modified sine which the transformer doesn't care about.

Hap_Hazzard

Standby generator

I didn't lose power in this storm--I've seen more snow in a paperweight than we got--but I realized a long time ago that our electric power grid is a joke. But since we never seem to lose gas service, a standby generator that runs on natural gas seemed like a great idea. It will even run on propane if the gas service does fail. It wasn't cheap but it's nice to know it's there waiting to fire up if I lose power, and I don't need to worry about whether the tank is full or how old the gas is.

MTC

What about a small steam powered generator...

So you just get the boiler up and running when power goes out, fire up the generator (maybe a couple diverter valves so you can cut it out when not needed), and let it keep the boiler going? Seems like it would be a fairly simple, cost effective backup, for those of you who are in power outage prone areas...

ChrisJ

Steam powered generator?

What kind of boiler are you expecting to power this generator? I would expect something needing 100-300PSI and thats out of my range of feeling safe.



Would be cool though.. a wood or coal powered generator.

MTC

I know next to nothing about steam turbines,

but my thought was something along the lines of the water powered exhaust fans you can get for a shower... uses the 40psi or whatever of the shower to power a fan motor.



I don't know how much pressure you'd need to generate any electricity, but the controls don't use much, so seems like you could maybe generate enough to get you by, as long as you don't have condensate pumps and the like. I guess automatic dampers and things could cause some problems too.



I'd assume you'd have to crank the pressure up a good bit anyway for that time period, but maybe its possible? I'm no electrical engineer...

Toymotorhead

Its an idea, but I don't think it would work.

Funny that this got mentioned, I was actually pondering a thing like this myself, and talking it over with my both of my engineer brothers.  Though we quickly determined that it probably would not work. The steam pressure is just too low for most any sort of turbine or piston engine. You might be able to do something with a modified Newcomen steam engine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_engine but I don't think it would be worth it in the long run. I am not sure if there is enough extra capacity on my boiler to heat and generate electricity. I wonder if you might be able to do it with a thermoelectric generator. I have not looked into tesla turbines.



The cool factor would be unbelievably high, but its would be much easier to just get yourself some big sealed lead acid batteries and an inverter. Not to mention that if you did come up with something mechanical that worked, you would then need to obtain a Boiler operators license just to run your furnace, and I hate to think what it would do to your homeowners insurance.....



Cheers

Richard.

Jean-David Beyer

Sounds like fun.

Just one question: does your boiler have an ASME S stamp?