Really bad install

fixasteamer

I want to say that this forum has been my most read item on the internet. I live in an old house with steam heat. Last year in December I had the old boiler replaced. Photo of the way it was installed. Severe water hammer, boiler runs out of water, valves spitting etc. After 1 week I redid the near boiler piping to meet the specs in the manual. The new boiler is a WM SGO5. Photo of what I did to the header. Much better. No water hammer, no valves spitting. This was in the middle of winter so I did not do all I wanted to do. I am going to increase the riser by 6" and do a drop header. The single 2" feed goes to the back wall and tee's to the left and right. I am going to add another feed to the header and cut out the tee so I have separate left and right steam mains. I am going to add a vaporstat, in series with the pressuretrol, and low pressure guage on a separate pigtail as the pressuretrol is way out of calibration. At .5 lbs. it doesn't shut off until 3.5 lbs and back on at 2.5 lbs. The boiler is to large. I have 385 sq ft of radiation. It's a good thing I didn't go with the contractors recommendation of an SGO 6 or 7. I will have it set to the low firing rate if I can find someone around here that actually uses test gear to set a burner up. That should put me in the ballpark. The boiler was installed without a barometric draft. Didn't work out to good. Has been fixed. All in all I don't think it is working too bad. Steam in 6 minutes, all radiators hot in 20 minutes, thermostat satisfied in about 35 minutes. During this cycle there is one shutdown on low water, lasts about 11/2 minutes,. I would like to get it to where it does not shut down on low water, this seems like a safety feature to me and should not be a "boiler control". I hope by eliminating the tee in the steam supply and doing the drop header I can achieve this result. Do you think I will make it worse by doing the drop header and creating 2 steam supplies or am I on the right track?  Again, this forum has been most helpful.

Paul S_3

drop header

no...definitely do the drop header, it will slow the exit velocity even more creating even drier steam....and remove that bullhead tee....about the low water problem, are you sure its going off on low water?...can it just be cycling off the p-trol?...i really cant see from pics what kind of returns you have....dry or wet....if wet maybe there partially clogged slowing the return of condensate back to boiler....more pics will help...PAUL S

fixasteamer

Condensate return

The only pipe you don't see completely is the rest of the equalizer. You can see it going toward the floor in the picture.  At the bottom of the boiler it turns horizontal and goes into the boiler return port. The condensate returns to the boiler thru the steam main, drops into the header and returns to the boiler thru the equalizer and/or boiler riser. I have the header slightly pitched toward the equalizer side.  I don't know if this is wet or dry? This is not new. No piping was removed during the new install, as this is the way it has worked thru a coal boiler then an oil boiler. I can send a picture of the equalizer piping, but that's all there is to it. The equalizer connects the header to the boiler return.

















       

RJ_4

install

Is this boiler atmospheric, if so why barometric damper, it looks like the horizontal flue is not pitched upward     could just be the angle of the picture

fixasteamer

Barometric draft

Not sure what you mean by atmospheric, but it is natural draft. The barometric draft control was needed as at times on windy days there was too much draft thru the chimney. The horizontal section of pipe does go uphill, checked with a level to confirm. I've been in this house since it was a coal fired boiler and since I redid the header this has been the quickest heating and quietest, as far as pipe noise, of any of the two previous boilers. First run this year with everything cold there was no pipe noise. Oil consumption with this boiler was lower than previous years. I think that doing the drop header and eliminating the bull head tee in the steam supply will help slow down and dry the steam out which I think will help it to get out to the radiators just a little bit quicker thereby making it a little bit more efficient. As it is now, all radiators (there are 11 total) reach all sections hot at the same time except 1 which lags by 1 section. This is a 38" high, 3 column, 7 section which is also the longest run. I just wondered what you thought about these possible changes or if I should just leave well enough alone?

Steamhead

The SGO-5

is a wet-base boiler that uses a power burner. We most often see it with a Beckett oil burner.