This boiler.....OMG

delta T

Found this beauty the other day

Check out the pics of the burner chamber, my illustrious competition supposedly did a tune up and service on this last year....and apparently charged money for it too did not mention that there were any problems that he saw and that it was running well .

The piping is what gets me. It has to be so much more work to do it like this than to just mount some unistrut and have something to pipe to, but maybe that's just me.

Given the amount of work needed to get this poor old beast back up and running the decision was made, we will be replacing it next week. finished the heat loss this morning and the existing boiler is about 40% oversized, one of the zones was overpumped by a factor of 2, so we should be able to realize some decent paypack with the new boiler (atmospheric Lochinvar CBN since I will not be able to get low enough water temps to make a modcon worth it).

I will post some pics once its done.

hot_rod

The white deposits on the burners look a lot like the boiler has been condensing for some periods. It could have been cleaned a season ago and still condensing. Watch for return temperature issues

Have fun with the renovation

delta T

@hot rod

Yeah I'm sure it was condensing, it was way over pumped, so the right pump should help, as should the built in bypass on the CBN. Traced out all the piping and whoever put it in did it pretty well, the baseboard is piped in 6 parallel loops with longest having about 25' of baseboard on it and the shortest having about 13', so at least I'm not fighting a single 60' loop of baseboard. May have to play with dampers a little to get it balance out nicely, or worst case put a balancing valve on the shorter loops. We shall see....

So glad we are replacing it, attached are some pics of the boiler once we I got it out and split apart for my scrap guy. So much worse than I thought. Pilot has been very sooty for a while (years, there was a pile of ash about 4 cups worth that fell out of the pilot location as we were splitting it), and the entirety of the inside of the boiler (burner side) is absolutely coated in white. The floor is so rotted out that the only reason the boiler didn't fall through was the favorable position of the floor joist under it.

@markirwin Thanks! took it out today, starting the new install tomorrow, should be done by Friday. I will post pics of the new one.

delta T

Almost done, finishing up the last little bit today.

delta T

just realized I forgot to attach the pics of the old boiler broken apart....

ChrisJ

delta T said:

just realized I forgot to attach the pics of the old boiler broken apart....

EEEEEEeeew.
That's scary.

EzzyT

It's a copper fin heat exchanger in that boiler

SWEI

It's got some residual weirdness inside called a Performance Loop. It was supposed to provide boiler protection integrally but from what I understand it never really worked all that well. You can remove it (I certainly would) but you need KIT30068 from Lochinvar.

delta T

I do like them, the performance loop helps with low return temps, if that is not an issue then get the kit. It has a built in DHW priority control, an outdoor reset, and you can adjust the paramters for the 2 stage firing control. Really a great boiler for the price point, and I have yet to really have any major problems with them, have about 5 out there now. And yes it is copper fin with steel or CI (not sure) headers, from what I understand the connection is purely mechanical, with no gaskets.