Replace refractory on Weil Mclain WGO worth it?

random12345

Hello wallies, basically what it says in the title. There are two Weil-Mclain WGO 3 Series oil boilers at a two-family property we own that is a rental. A P-WGO-3 (0.95 GPH) and a P-WGO-4 (1.20 GPH). The date code on the Beckett burners on both of them is 2001, so I am guessing they are both close to 21 years old. When those boilers die, we plan on converting the property to gas. It already uses gas water heaters, so we just want to ride these two out for as long as possible.

1) Is it worth replacing the refractory?

2) Who does a great job cleaning oil boilers in the Boston area? Should I just ask an oil company? The ones I know seems like they mostly limit themselves to working on the burner but don't generally clean out the combustion chamber or heat exchanger...

Here is what the refractory looks like on both of them:

Boiler 1:



Boiler 2:

STEVEusaPA

Any competent tech should be well versed in properly cleaning your boilers, and replacing the chambers.

mattmia2

you could be waiting a long time for those to fail

Big Ed_4

I seen worse .......

Steamhead

@random12345 , those WGOs should last a long time. And if you want to switch them to gas, Carlin EZ-Gas burners run very nicely in these boilers.

But don't try to convert them yourself! This is a job for a pro.

random12345

Thanks guys. I am less concerned about this now. Since this is a rental, I'd rather not experiment with a gas conversion burner unless I know it's approved by W-M.

Steamhead

random12345 said:

Thanks guys. I am less concerned about this now. Since this is a rental, I'd rather not experiment with a gas conversion burner unless I know it's approved by W-M.

When we asked W-M tech support about this they just shrugged their shoulders. They already offered WGO boilers (and SGO too) with several different burners. And the Carlin OEM Spec Guide does have an EZ-Gas spec for these WGOs. We install them with EZ-Gas burners quite frequently, and also convert older ones this way.