My New EK-2 Boiler Isn't Meeting Efficiency Expectations. Any Help Appreciated!

wjcandee

Three months ago, I had an EK-2 Frontier boiler with an 80 gal DHW tank installed by a Premier Dealer here in the Northeast. It is only running 22.5 percent better than what it replaced, which was a Bock 50ES oil water heater and a 100-ish year old gigantic asbestos-covered oil water boiler with ancient Carlin burner with 2 nozzles at 1.75gph each, which maintained 140 degrees 24/7/365 because we at one time used the coil and nobody dared turn it off in summer for fear that a turnoff would induce leaks.

Our neighbor replaced basically the same boiler and setup with a Weil-McLain Gold series for less money, and it is claimed that he saved over 35 percent. So the EK should do as well or better, but based on 8 years of degree-day/consumption data meticulously kept on the old boiler, the new boiler savings doesn’t even come close to 35 percent. The salespeople were talking 40 percent, but that now seems completely out of reach, very-dramatically-changing the financial calculations we made about the payback period for the investment.

We have two large hydronic zones feeding cast-iron radiators in a 5500-sq-ft old house. We have the high-mass-low-mass kit, and so we have a primary loop, and two injection loops through zone valves, which loops send part of the return flow through the EK mixing manifold, which receives and blends bypass water from boiler output side of the Flat Plate Heat Exchanger (FPE). The ball valve is full-open. The burner nozzle in the Carlin EZ1 is the default one. The thermostats are set for no more than 2 calls per hour, and I have been told that the draft and chimney are perfect.

The Premier Dealer that installed our boiler made a number of obvious installation errors that it has partially corrected, and they (re?)tuned the burner with a combustion analyzer and tell me that they thereby improved the burner efficiency by 5 percentage points. But they now claim everything about the installation is as it should be, and yet the efficiency isn’t what it should be, I think.

I have been videoing the boiler in operation, and I notice one thing that seems odd. Because we have large secondary loops with tons of cool water in them, the hydraulic operation of the system obviously depends on significant bypass water to temper the return water and prevent condensation and sooting. Despite the current bypass setup, which the dealer swears is exactly-correctly-configured, in a 20 minute call for heat on a mildly cool day, I counted 6 interruptions for condensation protection by the Display Energy Manger, which was functioning correctly based on its display of the return water temp, which appeared accurate. The small bypass pipe is hot, the large return pipe is cool, they blend together and yet still crash the boiler temp and cause a condensation-protection shutdown. Either that’s normal or it isn’t, and if it isn’t, why is the dealer telling me there isn’t anything to do to correct it? Could this be one part of why the efficiency is off? Is my boiler momentarily micro-sooting and harming its efficiency?

I want so badly to love my EK, which I researched long and hard before installing, and researched even more now that it doesn’t seem to be meeting expectations. My dealer’s people are extremely nice, but getting this all up and running and balanced correctly doesn’t seem to be a high priority; weeks go by with nothing happening. And I feel like the fluid dynamics and what I would call “master plumber” issues are not their forte. (Like it seemed to be a foreign concept when I mentioned that normally you want to have at least six pipe diameters of straight pipe upstream of the closely-spaced tees in the Hi Mass/Low Mass headers.) And while they now acknowledge the most-obvious mistakes (cross-wired thermostats, cross-piped returns, ProPress connections turning green, no check valves on mixing valve at the DHW tank outlet so a DHW call pulls hot water from the top rather than just cool water from the bottom of the tank, DHW system plumbed from a one-inch trunk cold to a one-inch trunk hot through a one-half-inch pipe which limits flow, no strainer despite being called for in the EK drawings, non-functional DHW recirc, and more), they claim that everything else is fine.

And yet we’re at 22.5 percent efficiency improvement in a shoulder season, where the EK should be at its best.

Is 7 shutdowns in a heat call “normal”? (These have reduced on the coldest days because the water in the zones doesn’t sit idle long enough to cool much.) Could that be part of my problem? Do I need more bypass?

What would “normally” account for this reduced gain in efficiency? I would greatly appreciate the wisdom of the members here, so I can speak intelligently with the dealer.

EBEBRATT-Ed

EK follows this forum so I will leave it for them to respond. They know the equipment much better than I do. Watch here in a few days for a response.

22% efficiency gain is nothing to sneeze at. People have to be careful promising big #s

I agree that 6 interruptions for condensation protection in 20 mi. Does not seem correct to me

109A_5

"I counted 6 interruptions for condensation protection by the Display Energy Manger"

"Is 7 shutdowns in a heat call “normal”?"

Not an EK expert, but I did not find anything in the manual about a boiler shutdown for condensation protection.

Or are you referring to a zone valve closing ?