Steam trap on low water cut out

MichaelK

Found this on a new site the other day and thought I'd post it here to see if anyone had any ideas as to .....why?  Looks like they tapped off the cross's from the low water cutout piping, made another loop and added a strainer, trap, and the trap dumps directly into a drain.  I'm not sure why this would be here or what someone was trying to accomplish.  I have never seen it before on any other boiler.  Thoughts?

Boiler wrestler

trap

Looks like there are twin boilers. Likely this trap is to keep the boiler that's not firing from flooding. Should be piped to condensate tank.

Steamhead

BW is right

it's called a spill or overflow trap. Dan covers this in Lost Art, page 183.

vaporvac

Necessary

Not to hijack this post. but is this necessay with every twin boiler install?

MichaelK

Lost Art

Thanks for the help.  We just recently moved and I saw my Lost Art bible somewhere but could not locate it the other night when I was looking this up.  Thanks for the page number as soon as it shows up I'll read up on it some more.  Thanks again everyone. 

Dave in QCA

NO

This type of a setup is only required on boilers with feed water pumps. On a gravity return, such as you are doing Colleen, if condensation does raise the boiler that is not running, it will equalize with the other boiler through the return lines. That is the main reason that I was suggesting a simpler return piping setup for your install -- it allows the boilers to equalize better, perhaps.



Also, this tendency for the lag boiler to take on water is a very slow phenomena, but can cause problems if the lag boiler is automatically brought online by the controls. Thus, the trap installed as shown. This is a detail that is shown by the WM diagrams for multiple boilers.