Summer shut down and 8 way treatment

skimmer

raised pressure to blow down boiler via drain port. Just got dirty black water to come out. Not too much. Accidentally emptied all the water.

Anyway refilled with fresh water and 8 way treatment. Ran boiler to produce steam and then shut down. Leaving the treated water all summer.

Hoping this helps with the burnham independence failures ??

I plan on doing the 8 way every summer just not emptying all the water

Help hurt or doesn’t matter?

ethicalpaul

8-way is good, it will nearly eliminate corrosion under the water line (and I believe it helps protect the castings above the water line as well).

Short answer, what you did is about the best you could do given that you had accidentally emptied your boiler. The only thing you could have done better would be to heat the water outside of the boiler to drive out the oxygen and then add it to your boiler.

By heating the fresh water you were trying to avoid having the oxygen in the water. That's not a bad thought, but I don't think it helps your boiler much, I'll explain below. The 8-way might have some oxygen-capturing or "scrubbing" capability, I'm not sure).

Question: Why doesn't heating the water matter, contrary to many people's opinions?

Answer: The water is going to get heated at some point, and no matter when it gets heated, the oxygen is driven out and at that moment is when it attacks the above-water interior of the boiler.

Think of this: If heating the water shortly after adding it was enough to protect the above-waterline interior of the boiler's castings, then it wouldn't even matter, because in normal operation the water DOES in fact get heated by the next call for heat! And yet boilers still rot out when auto-feeders add water when it is low.

Next Question: If boilers don't even rot out under the waterline, then why should I bother to add 8-way at all?

Answer: Because "dirty water", "muddy water" or "rusty water" is a major thing that makes people need or want to drain water out of their boilers. By reducing below-the-waterline corrosion (and it takes very little to make the water "muddy"), it reduces the need/desire to be draining water all the time, which reduces the need to refill with damaging fresh water, which keeps oxygen away from the top of interior of the castings where we always see boilers rotting out.

Even another question: But isn't there always air/oxygen in the upper part of the casting in between calls for heat? Why does it even matter if I add a bunch of fresh water?

Answer: Fantastic question! I'm not 100% sure, but strong anecdotal evidence tells us that fresh water introduction greatly reduces the time a casting will resist rotting out, so the oxygen that is driven out of fresh water must be more damaging than the oxygen in the air that is drawn into the boiler after every call for heat (oxygen only makes up 21% of air).

skimmer

good points @ethicalpaul

What is your opinion on filling the boiler up to the top with 8 way in the water? Versus filling it about 3/4 up the sight glass with the 8 way mixed in? Any protection ? My last burnham developed a hole above the water line after about 16 years

ethicalpaul

I think it's not a big difference, those two options. I do like to put it above the normal water line at least a little (but in my boiler I do it with distilled water now).

I like to keep my water line higher generally during the heating season too because I think it lets more heat transfer from the combustion gases to the higher up iron which is cooled by the boiling water sloshing onto it higher.

If your old Burnham rotted out after 16 years, why did you get another one? Not slagging on you, just curious.

I have no solid data for this, but the Burnham IN series seems so prone to high-up rotting. I feel the castings might be very thin up there and/or get very hot up there high above the waterline. If I had one, I would keep the waterline as high as I could without priming occurring (boiling water getting carried up to the header)—as evidenced by a drop of more than 1.5" in the gauge glass during steam production.

Long Beach Ed

Many of the old books recommended flooding steam boilers during extended periods of non-use, like summer shut-down. That was professional advice in the day.

EBEBRATT-Ed

ASME Code (I know it doesn't apply to residential) used to talk about "wet lay up" and 'dry lay up"

skimmer

@ethicalpaul it was the winter time and I didn’t know about the burnham problem. And it made sense to get it to line up to the existing drop headers and basically slide a new one right in. Even the guy who did it didn’t like burnhams but bc of those reasons I went with an exact replacement

ethicalpaul

thanks, that makes sense. If you care about its longevity you can keep the water level high and pre-heat your makeup water.

But most people seem to move pretty often these days so it may not matter to you

Long Beach Ed

I believe Burnham made modifications (improvements) to the Independence boiler to mitigate their "problem".

ethicalpaul

That's great if they did, but really they should have trashed it and moved all steam customers over to their SteamMax and MegaSteam models.