Low water cutoff and automatic water fill

eileen2017

I have a steam heat boiler with low water cutoff and a automatic water fill. In the past the lwc system failed and my house flooded...replace it twice I caught the malfunction before it could flood my house again and have stopped using the automatic fill. My question is since I need to manually fill every 2 weeks or so if I plan on going away for around 3 weeks in the winter and for safety I'm planning on turning off the whole house water supply is there anything out there I could use to add water without having to worry.

hvacfreak2

A second low water cut off could be added higher in the boiler or system piping to energize a solenoid valve ( or interlocked to drop the water feeder ) to shut off the make up water. Ideally this would be set at an elevation to allow the boiler to still make steam . It would also be nice if you could receive an alert that an over fill condition occurred ( a light in the house turn on , an email or text ).

Jamie Hall

If your house water supply is turned off, as you say you plan to do, there is no way that I can see that you could have any sort of thing to automatically add water to the boiler. Where would the water come from? Am I missing something?

I (and now my daughter after me!) take care of a few houses which are unoccupied in the winter, and yes, we are paid to do it. We check them regularly -- depending on the weather from weekly to daily. The heat is one thing we do look at!

You could get someone to do that, perhaps, and not turn off the water.

That said, you could also get someone to install a reliable automatic water feeder on the boiler. And an automatic low water cutoff. And the recommended second, lower, manual reset low water cutoff.

hvacfreak2

Yeah , I totally missed the part about the water supply being turned off , lol.

Ok , a storage tank mounted in the ceiling could be added ( tee into make up line ). It should only need to be 5 gallons or so , and manually valve it on when the water supply is turned off.

Edit : As mentioned the other stuff should checked and repaired if needed. Water feed symptoms sometimes take us down a longer road to the solution for sure.

KC_Jones

I'm more curious why it needs water every 2 weeks. Is it hitting the low water cutoff every 2 weeks? If it is I would consider that excessive water usage.