main vent shooting water!

Prospect_Handy_Man

Ok in the last year I have been trouble shooting and slowly repairing an old 2 pipe steam system in an apartment building in upstate NY. I have replaced all the radiator traps, insulated the steam main and have been putting unions in the return piping so it can be flushed out regularly. I just added one Hoffman 8C trap to the end of each main because no vents were there. The two mains each hold about 10 cubic feet of air. The problem I am having is at the beginning of each heating cycle the tee on the outlet of each trap is shooting out about a quart of water. The trap is attached to the end of the main, and the outlet connects to a tee which is open to the atmosphere on the side and a drip line is connected to the bottom of the tee which connects into the return below the boiler water line. It just started doing this a couple days ago. It was working fine before that. The near boiler piping is also very wrong and has no Hartford loop. Just has two lines coming out of the top of the boiler and joining at a tee where it rises up to each main. The return connects into the bottom. There is no equalizer. I would like to schedule a consult with an expert. Any expert interested in coming to Herkimer, NY for a consult would be great. If you are interested please let me know.

Jamie Hall

Nothng fundamentally wrong

with a trap at the end of the main -- except that they are usually piped in quite a specific way.



The end of the main has a drip to the wet return at that location -- quite commonly just an elbow down at the end of the main, and down it goes.



The line to the trap takes off from the top of the main about a foot or so before that elbow.  It goes up perhaps six inches, elbows over, and goes into the trap inlet.  The outlet of the trap -- in most installations -- goes into a dry return which is, in turn, vented, often at the boiler and also dripped to the wet return at that location.



You don't say whether you have a dry return at that location.  You could do it with the outlet just going to a wet return by coming vertically in one arm of a T and continuing straight down out the other arm of the T.  You could take the leg of that T, come over horizontally about 6 inches again, and go straight up to an elevation above the top of the trap.



Almost any other arrangement is likely to subject the trap to water hammer, if nothing worse, and could indeed result in water passing the trap squirting out somewhere -- keep in mind that the trap is intended to allow water to pass!  That's why it is set above the main -- so it is acting only as a vent.



You are going to have a lot of water in the mains until you get your near boiler piping straightened out...

JStar

Steam

Message me privately and we can talk about a consultation.



j.starosielec@ecuacool.com