Water loss

Neild5

There was a pretty big spike in water usage over Thanksgiving, the boiler was calling for water on every other firing. It's a 4 year old boiler in a 20 unit apartment building, so I was concerned. One of the tenants returned from visiting family to find her apartment both full of steam and condensation on walls and windows, an old Dole vent had corroded so bad it blew the top off. It is amazing how much steam can get through a 1/8 npt hole.

EBEBRATT-Ed

At least you know how the water was lost. Fix the vent and adjust the steam pressure as low as possible to heat the building.

Keep monitoring the water loss to make sure nothing else is going on.

ethicalpaul

Yeah I was going to say, what pressure is your system generally running at? The boiler is probably very oversized and shoving tons of steam. The same thing happened to my dentist in one of the Penn District buildings—his whole office was soaked after returning from break. It always happens on break.

Neild5

The system has a modulation burner, and the EDR is 97% of the boiler rating, sorry I don't have the actual numbers as i am traveling this week. The modulation reduces the burner at 18 oz/in, and the vaporstat is set to 22 oz/in, I have not seen the vapostat shut the system down so it is running between 18 and 22 oz/in. It starts at 100% fire and drops to 38 to 45% until thermostat is satisfied. The tech said he should be able to tweak it lower, but wants to wait until it is cold enough that the system will run long enough to play with it.

mattmia2

It should work modulating to keep it at half that. Since it is one pipe I don't think there would be anything that would rely on steam pressure to operate.

Neild5

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/comment/1824604#Comment_1824604

It will, the pressure transducer was replaced and needs to be adjusted, but I need to be in town when it is cold, next couple of days are going to be, but I am 350 miles away.