Flooded Kitchen

subaru400

I found references to my problem, but being older, I can't fix it myself and need help. Please forgive me if I wasn't thorough in my search.
I came home today to a flooded first floor. I thought I may have left the water on in the sink or something, but long story short ... water was dripping out of my vents. This couldn't have been more than 7 hours in the making, so I suspect that, little by little, the water has been driven back up the system over a longer period, and has finally overflowed at the vents. System has been OFF for 3 months (meaning at thermostat). My boiler is 4 years old and the business that installed it did an annual check-up almost exactly one year ago and found no issues. Now they are out of business. I shut off the water and electricity to the heating system, and drained crystal-clear water into the floor drain (the sight glass had a lot of sediment in it, though). I mopped up my floors and hopefully averted a major catastrophe, but I suspect I will need a new boiler and also (based on the leakage), some new, valves, vents and even pipes when I have them jack up the sagging floor joists. The closest thing to a Dead Man in my area won't drive the 35 miles to my house, so I need someone in Michigan to help me out before it gets cold. Can anyone please offer a suggestion?

Steamhead

You don't need a new boiler. You probably do need a new water feeder, low-water cutoff or both. What part of MI?

Jamie Hall

Oh dear. Well, I'm going to hit you with some questions here, but first:

Photograph, with a date stamp, all the damage. Not just the heating system, but cabinets, rugs, furniture, etc. Then call your homeowner's insurance and start working on them. Do this before you start cleaning up the mess.

Now... as to recovery of the heating system. First step is to find out what went wrong, so...

How does water get into the boiler? Is there a manual feed, or an automatic feeder? And if automatic, is there a bypass? You may want to take photographs of all the piping around the boiler and post them, if you're not sure what's what. Then, is there a domestic hot water coil in the boiler, or is domestic hot water produced separately?

There really are only two ways excess water can get into the boiler. One is the regular boiler feed, and the other is the domestic hot water coil if there is one. We need to know what you have.

Now. The next step -- after your photography session, is (with the boiler power and water off) drain the water out until you can see the water level in the gauge glass. Mark that level. Observe it. If the water level holds, that's a good first step and go to the next step. If it goes up, however, whatever valve it is which allows water into the boiler is leaking and will have to be replaced. If it does hold, and you have an automatic feeder, turn the automatic feeder back on (if you have one). You may have to restore power to the boiler to do this, but keep the thermostat off (if the boiler wasn't under water -- if it was actually under water... more later). The water level should stay where it was. If it goes up in this step either the feeder is leaking -- they do -- or the control for it is defective.

Repair the above items as needed.

Now the boiler itself. There is no good reason why it should need replacement. However, if the water got high enough to get to the burner or any of the controls, anything which got flooded will need to be replaced. If the water got into the combustion chamber, there is insulation in there which may also need to be replaced.

Piping. It is doubtful that pipes will need to be replaced. However, if you have to jack up floors from which they are hung they will have to be rehung so that they pitch correctly. But could I ask why floor joists sagged? If they did, you may have structural damage which you should get an engineer to evaluate.

Vents and valves. Vents may have been damaged. More likely not; you will need to evaluate that on a case by case basis. It's very unlikely than valves were damaged

If you have more questions or comments, come on back. I might add that photos of the boiler and all the piping in its immediate vicinity would be helpful.

And to go back to square one: get your insurance company on board before you do anything else.

EBEBRATT-Ed

@subaru400 I was going to post but you have good advise from the above posts...nothing to add

subaru400

Thank you all ... I will post photos and more information after the adjuster visits in a day or so. Also - mid-Michigan near Owosso Very much appreciate the prompt replies!!