Pipes and radiators banging and glass water gauge full

Jrich417

help! This heating system is a nightmare and has on and off issues for 11 years. The pipes and radiators are banging extremely loud. The valves on the radiators are spraying out brown water. The glass gauge is full to the top. So much corrosion on the pipes. I don’t own this house but have dealt with this issue for 11 years and there has been 2 different plumbers/heating guys here over the years.. thank you in advance for taking the time to read and look at all the photos.

Jamie Hall

If the sight glass is full of water, the boiler is overfilled. In fact, probably way overfilled. I see a handy drain valve which may even work, so hook up a hose and start draining! Now because there may have been some neglect involved here, when the water gets halfway on the sight glass, turn the boiler on and make sure it starts and runs. Then, with it running, keep draining and make sure the low water cutoff turns the boiler off again.

If the LWCO doesn't turn the boiler off, turn it off with the emergency switch and tag it out until you figure out why and get it fixed.

Now with the LWCO having turned the boiler off, the automatic water feeder should come on (there may be a time delay) and put water back in until the boiler fires again. And then it should stop. That much it. If it stops feeding, great. Use the bypass to bring the water level to halfway up the glass.

Next step is pressure. The pressuretrol is set much too high. Set the main scale down to 2 and the differential to 1.

When you speak of valves spitting brown water, do you mean the vents on the radiators? Or the packing on the shutoff valves? If it's the vents, a)I'm not surprised, b)odds are excellent that they are done. The combination of excess pressure and flooding has probably ruined them.

And last (for now) — the near boiler piping is horrible, and I doubt that you'll really get the system quiet and running well — but it should get better.

ethicalpaul

The water level is way too high as Jamie implied. I can see gunk floating in it which indicates it needs to be skimmed. It is surging if brown water is shooting out of your vents.

Any competent steam professional could help you greatly here. Have you tried the "Find a Contractor" tool on this site?

Where are you located?

KC_Jones

"I don’t own this house but have dealt with this issue for 11 years " Are you the contractor I assume?

It is also possible it's so overfilled that the water coming out is how full the system is.

Turn off all water feeds to the boiler.

Drain the water until the sight glass is half full.

Run the system but stay with it (since you turned the water off) to watch what is happening with the sight glass. The water should bounce a little, maybe 1/2" and may drop a little. If it's bouncing a lot, or the level drops dramatically you have an issue. It could be surging because it wasn't skimmed when new, it could be the incorrect piping on the boiler, or a combination of both. Surging can create a temporary low water condition, the feeder feeds, then all the water returns and it overfills over time.

If the above test checks out ok, turn the water feed back on and see what happens. The water level should not go up in the gauge glass, if it does then there is a bad valve somewhere. Could be the auto feed, could be the bypass valve. This could take a while, you could mark the gauge glass with tape and check it a few hours later to see if it went up, but the boiler needs to be off that entire time for a valid test.

There will probably be more to come, but need to baby step through things to diagnose. One thing I can say, the readout on the water feeder indicates to me about 40 years of water usage, so there is something wrong. Either a leak, or overfilling. My suggestions are starting with overfilling based on the description.

Other observation:

The near boiler piping is incorrect.

The pressuretrol is set far too high, it's comically high honestly.

Jrich417

if I did all those steps and the water is not draining from the glass gauge.. how do I drain water from the gauge? I drained a good amount of brown water from the boiler and no more is coming out

Jamie Hall

If the water is not draining from the sight glass when you drain the boiler, you have a potentially VERY dangerous problem, although it's not as bad as it might be since it seems your low water cutoff is on a different tapping.

The problem is that either the valves to the sight glass are turned off or the connection tappings for the sight glass are plugged. You need to drain the boiler well below the sight glass (you can take this opportunity to make sure the LWCO does cut the boiler off) then take the sight glass assembly apart and clean out the openings into the boiler. Have an extra sight glass on hand — they break dismayingly easily. Then put it back together.

The hazard is that without the sight glass responding you really don't know how much water is in there — and a dry fire is a possibility, and those can ruin your whole day.

109A_5

Hello Jrich417,

The pressuretrol was probably cranked up to keep the burner running with the flooded condition (head pressure of the water) otherwise the boiler's burner would probably not run with mild flooding (as it should be).

System using way to much water. Leaking somewhere, wet return plugged up and/or surging and taking on way too much water. LWCO erroneously calling for water (otherwise it would not get logged).

How good a skim can you get with this setup ? With the flooding the oils are probably way up in the system and may take a while to return to the boiler so they ALL can be removed. I did not see any other provision for skimming, take the valve off to skim.

Turn off the boiler, drain the boiler, remove the sight glass valve stems (unscrew packing nuts) and verify the pipes are not plugged back into the boiler block using a sight glass protection rod.