drop header question

leonz

Asking as a novice that grew up with single pipe steam heat;

I know this is a physics problem and the dead men are probably going to say "YOU STUPID KID".

If one was to install a drop header on a new installation or and old steam boiler would it be overkill and a waste of pipe to create the drop header by first creating the cross piping connections from the two+ steam jacket tappings using short nipples, tee's and unions and then come down from the the the other tees installed downward with short nipples to connect to a second set of tee's, unions and elbows to create the second much larger and longer drop header pipe?

I was thinking along the lines of a heat scavenging scenario where the steam created would be allowed to expand a second time in the second longer and larger diameter header pipe before it exited the lowest header pipe to the heating load from the tee connections in the lower header pipe.

Would an installation like this lose too much dry steam heat energy from expansion to create the amount of beneficial dry steam heat needed for a heating load of any size or am I howling at the moon here? haha

It would make for a fun physics problem with the law of gasses and all.

EBEBRATT-Ed

The only reason to install a drop header is to "dry out the steam" and separate the steam from the water.

An old system with an old boiler there usually is no need for a drop header the steam and water separate in the old boiler due to the design of the boiler & unless you are having problems leave it be.

Newer boilers are designed differently the steam and water cant separate in the boiler....they require a large header to do this. Either a regular header or a drop header will work

Intplm.

@leonz .........not a stupid kid. Thats a good question and was answered well by ^^^^^^^^ @EBEBRATT-Ed

Steamhead

leonz said:

Asking as a novice that grew up with single pipe steam heat;

I know this is a physics problem and the dead men are probably going to say "YOU STUPID KID".

If one was to install a drop header on a new installation or and old steam boiler would it be overkill and a waste of pipe to create the drop header by first creating the cross piping connections from the two+ steam jacket tappings using short nipples, tee's and unions and then come down from the the the other tees installed downward with short nipples to connect to a second set of tee's, unions and elbows to create the second much larger and longer drop header pipe?

I was thinking along the lines of a heat scavenging scenario where the steam created would be allowed to expand a second time in the second longer and larger diameter header pipe before it exited the lowest header pipe to the heating load from the tee connections in the lower header pipe.

Would an installation like this lose too much dry steam heat energy from expansion to create the amount of beneficial dry steam heat needed for a heating load of any size or am I howling at the moon here? haha

It would make for a fun physics problem with the law of gasses and all.

You could probably do much the same thing on a standard drop header by making the horizontal pipes between the risers from the boiler and the drops into the header, one size larger than the risers from the boiler but one size smaller than the header itself.

JohnNY

I'm not following your description of the configuration you're proposing but for various reasons I've got several installations out there where we've downsized the boiler so significantly that we created one header directly above the boiler, then piped up to the ceiling of the old, existing header.
In other words, on occasion I run into an existing 4"-6" header that isn't set up quite right for our replacement boiler's 3" header requirements, and since it kills me to cut out and throw away big, pricey cast iron fittings, we just pipe to them and take advantage of their velocity-slowing positions in the piping network.
This may be an unpopular statement but, in my opinion, steam piping, while not nearly as forgiving as hot water piping, can be installed with a touch of cautious creativity at times.

EBEBRATT-Ed

@JohnNY
I agree. An oversized boiler piped wrong sometimes works because it has a small load in relation to the boiler size. The steam moves slower