Boiler feed valve

LisaC0801

Help!! My husband accidentally turned the boiler feeder valve yesterday while he was flushing our hot water heater. Doing so water poured from 2 radiators in our house. 1 flooded my kitchen. He shut the valves off on radiators. We also turned the heat off at that time. Fast forward to today, and our boiler will not turn on. The pilot is out. We tried resetting it. What else can we do?? We have an intermittent ignition boiler. 

109A_5

Hello @LisaC0801,
Well the safest thing to do is call a Pro to assess the damage and do the needed repairs.

I would speculate the system is still water bound and the Pressuretrol has shut it all down with the weight of the excessive water level. The Pressuretrol could be damaged along with the air vents on the radiators.

With an 'Intermittent Ignition' boiler it is normal for the pilot to be out until there is a call for heat. In this case there is probably a safety device preventing the normal operation, so the automatic lighting of the pilot has been disabled.

Jamie Hall

This is steam? If so. Step 1 -- reopen those radiator valves. Now go down to the basement and locate the sight glass on the boiler (vertical glass tube on the front of the boiler). It's probably full of water, but that can be hard to decide. Now locate a handy drain on the boiler. Turn off the power to the boiler (emergency switch). Open the handy drain and keep an eye on that sight glass. At some point you will see -- hopefully -- a water line appear in it. Keep draining until that water line is about half way down, then close the drain.

Now the fun begins. Some boilers have a manual resetting safety pressure cutout in addition to the automatic one (they all should, in my humble opinion, but that's another story). See if you can find it -- it will have a reset button on it. If you find it, push the reset button.

Now go and turn on the power to the boiler and see what happens. It may light off on its own. If it does not, check and see if there are instructions for relighting the pilot, and follow them.

If you're still cold... probably time to call for service people to come out and look.

Now the bad news. It is possible that the flooding has damaged the vents. With luck, not -- but if you find some radiators which worked before don't now, or if the heating is much less even, you may need to replace the vents which got flooded.