SARCO NO12 A

Mike20

I have this old boy installed on a steam return line on a 2 pipe heating system in a large apartment building in Manhattan it appears to be some kind of air vent or Vacuum breaker since there is only one 3/4'' pipe connection at the bottom. The system is a non vacuum return system at this time however it may have been vacuum return in the past
let me know if you have any ideas - I cant find it on line
Thank you
MIKE

Sailah

Sure looks like an early Sarco Air Eliminator. All the current models are based on a bucket trap housing and say POINT ARROW STRAIGHT DOWN.

Would have a float mechanism per my earliest (1959) Sarco catalog

Fred

@Sailah , I have an old Sarco 6T (as shown in this cut sheet) that I had on my one pipe steam system. Any idea what the venting capacity is on that air eliminator? It says 3000 square ft. of radiation but given it is a Main vent, that seems like a strange way of defining capacity???
This old thing still worked fine when I replaced it with multiple Hoffman 75's as I could at least calculate needed capacity relative to amount of air to be expelled from the mains. Thanks

nicholas bonham-carter

Fred, do you have only one dry return?
This would have been most useful on a 2-pipe vapor-vacuum system.
On a 2-pipe, I am sure it only had to allow the air to escape only a few times a winter, so the capacity did not matter, as once the vacuum was formed, the system was home free. With the 1-pipe, we are stuck with expelling all the air, at every firing
That could be still the case today, especially with a large apartment building, with numerous long verticals. Find and fix any vacuum leaks, and you are good to go.--NBC

Sailah

Fred said:

@Sailah , I have an old Sarco 6T (as shown in this cut sheet) that I had on my one pipe steam system. Any idea what the venting capacity is on that air eliminator? It says 3000 square ft. of radiation but given it is a Main vent, that seems like a strange way of defining capacity???
This old thing still worked fine when I replaced it with multiple Hoffman 75's as I could at least calculate needed capacity relative to amount of air to be expelled from the mains. Thanks

TLV has a nice website with a steam orifice calculator, I bet you could plug in your parameters and get a good idea. For reference, the new air vent I had made is 5/8" orifice vs 1/8". Any of our steam traps easily has twice that size orifice.

Fred

nicholas bonham-carter said:

Fred, do you have only one dry return?
This would have been most useful on a 2-pipe vapor-vacuum system.
On a 2-pipe, I am sure it only had to allow the air to escape only a few times a winter, so the capacity did not matter, as once the vacuum was formed, the system was home free. With the 1-pipe, we are stuck with expelling all the air, at every firing
That could be still the case today, especially with a large apartment building, with numerous long verticals. Find and fix any vacuum leaks, and you are good to go.--NBC

@nicholas bonham-carter No I have two Mains and I replaced this Sarco with multiple hoffman 75's on each main several years ago. I was just wondering what the Sarco 6T capacity might be. At the time I replaced it, it was the only vent on one main and a single Hoffman 75 was all there was on the other main. I know have multiple Hoffmans on each main. They work fine.

@Sailah , Thanks. The old Sarco does have a 1/8" orifice and probably isn't much better than a single Hoffman. I hung on to this thing but it's probably time to just pitch it. It's a step back in time for sure.