Help with an old vapor system

joe_14

I am having a problem with an old vapor system. The system is an old down-fired G.E.boiler with a carlin burner.That part of the system is working fine.
When i got to the customer house the boiler was flooded .I drained the boiler to proper level.Iam not sure what caused the flooding auto feeder not leaking by.Boiler is not surging,I think domestic coil may be leaking.
The system has a boiler return trap and a air elimanator trap. Also has cross over vent/trap at the end of the mains.The problem i am having is after i got the boiler level correctand ran the boiler everything started to heat but after a short time of operation I noticed that steam was coming out of the air eliminator trap. What is the best way of trouble shooting this. Could it be a bad cross-over trap but if this was the case the raditors wouldnt
heat,true? Could it be something wrong in the boiler return trap,like,maybe the float is sticking not sealing the steam side of the trap.
Any info and help would be greatly appreciated.I dont know if it would be a good idea to take apart the boiler return trap and try to clean any thoughts on this.

thanks for any help

joe.g.

Unknown

Shut it off and

Cool the piping down, then fire the boiler. The crossover trap should heat first, of all the traps. It acts like just a vent, up on top of the mains. The trap should get hot and close tight. No water will move through it, to speak of, because it is on top of the main. The return pipe should not get hot to touch.

If the return at that point doesn't get hot right away, the traps elsewhere need to be checked the same way. Just go up and down the length of the dry return and find the hot spots as they form in the return. The bad trap will be near that point.

The pressure in the returns (combined air and steam blowing by) will cause the radiators that do heat to hold a bunch of water. That all comes back after the run cycle ends. That's the flood water.

Noel

Steamhead

Also Check

the equalizing line between the Return Trap and the dry return (if there is one). This is usually a 1/2-inch pipe. If this line gets hot right away on a cold-start, the Return Trap is leaking steam into the dry return, where it comes out the air-eliminator trap.

If the Return Trap is shot, remove it and replace the Pressuretrol with a Vaporstat that cannot be set higher than 1 PSI (unless the boiler already has such a Vaporstat). Set the Vaporstat so the boiler pressure will not overcome the "B" Dimension (height of lowest part of dry return above boiler water line). 30 inches of "B" equals 1 PSI.

The Return Trap was developed in the days when boiler pressure could not be closely controlled to 8 ounces or so, the average maximum pressure for Vapor systems. But now we have Vaporstats which do the job nicely!

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