How to get water to circulate in basement zone

Wilson

I'm a homeowner who recently had a new weil mclain boiler installed that serves four zones and an indirect domestic water heater. All the zones heat up fine except the basement, which won't heat at all. Can't get the hot water to the basement move much past the boiler room even after opening up bleeders along the line. I've had this problem with previous basement water circuits too. And suggestions?

Joe Grosso

Seen this before

Could be a couple of problems.Fris t a couple of questions.Is this a loop system in the basemt.If it is and when they installed the boiler for you you could force city water pressure through that line will solve that problem.Second could be a mono flow sysem where you have a air pocket that is preventing the proper flow of water through the system.Much harder to solve.Third you could have a clooged piece of pipe that is not making the water flow through the zone.Just had this on a job last week.Problem was all the heating pipes for the basement zone were buried in the ground.

bruce pirger

As another homeowner...
My guess is your system is not filled to capacity.
Our two zone baseboard setup (main floor and basement) suffered from noisy/clangy/banging/cool basement zone until I discovered a hidden bleed valve in the ceiling through an access hatch. Unbelievable amount of air spewed out from that valve.
After replacing a defective automatic fill valve/pressure regulator assembly and refilling the system to capacity at the proper pressure, no more problems. (The fill valve is kept closed, by the way.)
We have a Burnham gas boiler with old fashioned ceiling mounted steel expansion tank and two B&G circulators and flow control valves.
Nothing fancy such as automatic vents or bladder tank.
But properly set up, we have the quietest and smoothest running baseboard setup.
Next step is fancier controls such as outdoor reset.

(Thanks to Dan's books and folks at The Wall.)

tombig

Basement Radiators

Basement are tough. The supply and return piping is ABOVE the radiators. If the installing contractor didn't allow for bleeding the mains to that zone it is extremely difficult to to remove air and impossible from the radiators which are below the mains. There should either be an air bleeder located in the basement cieling or a flow isolation purge valve set in the piping if it's piped in series.