Steam Vent long ago

hexxman

I manage 60 year old NYC buildings. I asked the original owners and their family members about the vents and they claim that the buildings had one size Hoffman vents through out the entire 50 unit buildings. Why did the "old timers" and engineers do this? We are told today to balance with various size vents. It begs the question what is correct?

Steamhead

Simple. Back then, the buildings likely would have had coal-fired boilers. These boilers were "banked" at night so the fires would not go out, then fired in the early morning, and stayed hot all day. So the steam only came up once a day. Even radiators far away from the boiler would stay hot once the steam reached them.

This also explains why many vintage systems did not have main vents. So what if that furthest apartment took an hour to get heat? Once the rads got hot, they stayed hot all day.

Long Beach Ed

Number 6 oil was 3-cents per gallon. Tenants wore sweaters and cursed the landlord or opened the double hung zone valves.

hexxman

always been oil. we built them

Long Beach Ed

I believe adjustable and different-size steam vents were a "new innovation" that came around in the 1930s with oil heat. Like most things in the day, they may have been slow to catch on.

Some of the oil systems only cycled on pressure and didn't even have thermostats.

Different times: Many apartments overheated and many were cold. Tenants grew up in a different age and were happy to have central steam heating.