Am I being simpleminded for wanting a Weil-McLain just like my old one?

OuterCapeOilguy

I just revisited this thread and noticed the picture of your boiler showing the fuel filter arrangement; it appears you have a Tiger Loop with a spin-on filter. Any reason you kept the old-style (and not very effective) General cartridge filter? Also, if you mount the Tiger Loop to the right side of the boiler and pipe it to the burner with flex hoses; makes cleaning much easier as you can swing open the burner door without disconnecting fuel lines.

hot_rod

here is a piping option, put the pump and sep on a horizontal run, if you can get two ells in there

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seized123

Hi @OuterCapeOilguy basically I put in two filters when I converted from two to one pipe a year ago and got a lot of advice on this forum. Most was that two filters was a good idea, the most negative comments about keeping the General said that it’s unnecessary with the spin-on, but I don’t think anybody said it was bad, so I decided to go for both.

Also about a year ago I changed all my undersink and toilet water lines from those flex hoses to solid copper. At that time I had heard nightmare stories of those bursting, two on this forum, causing tens of $K’s of damage. Then I took plumbing 1 at local county trade school and the instructor with 40 years union experience (a lot of it as a supervisor) said he never installs those on private residential jobs, and related a similar story he knew of first hand, again $10K’s of damage. Most recently the guy at the supply house told another similar story. I know lots of guys love them and I probably I would too if I did this for a living, they are very convenient. Maybe the flex lines for oil are better somehow but I decided to stick with copper tube, easy enough to remove maybe once a year, and having the filters and TL on the left seemed easier with the copper tube, configuration- and door-opening-wise.

@hot_rod now that I have the thing installed (just in time for a cold snap) I definitely want to think about improving things, though maybe those should be “summer projects…”

I assume by “sep” you mean air separator, a thing I wanted but didn’t have room for over there. @EdTheHeaterMan pointed out WM’s internal air separator configuration, but if a separate device would only improve things I like your idea, seems to me with iron pipe the weight of pump plus separator would be supported okay, maybe with strapping for good measure. An alternative is the original idea of cutting the manifold and moving it up, but that would mean five cuts (for five zones) and 10 solders at slip joints when I have become paranoid about soldering where water likes to drip, definitely not something I wanted to deal with and cause delay with cold weather coming. Your idea seems more convenient and more flexible, I could make the runs as long as I like.

I want to do everything I can to extend the life of this thing, given that we have “aggressive” water. I’m going to post questions on that issue, maybe on @ethicalpaul’s recent thread about water quality and treatment.