Wet Steam

tom d

I have a two family house with two Weil McLain 368st boilers,installed at same tine,same amount of radiators, first floor boiler makes dry steam, 2nd floor makes wet steam. Ive cleaned them both,2nd floor boiler sight glass,shows wet steam,also the piping is the same, as per factory spec. Any advice on a cure,or on making the steam dry .thank you tom

DanHolohan

Check the oil burner nozzle

Those boilers do funny things when the firing rate isn't right.

tom d

wet steam

The boilers are fired at the same rate 0.85 80A , i down fired the boiler with know results. thanks tom

ta finnegan

Wet steam

I always go back to the near boiler piping and maybe quadruple check the tolerances. The number of times this causes the wet steam is astounding. I never over or under fire a boiler. Recheck it all for logic and sizing and make sure the equalizer is piped properly.

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steve_6

wet steam

how do you check for wet steam? and when you build your header how much does this dry it out, say if you increase your pipe size from 2" to 3", or to 4"?

hot_rod

dry steam and wet steam

sometimes a picture can help.

Noel

hot_rod

and another

.

hot_rod

.........

.

steve_6

impressive

the header looks to be 3" or 4" so what makes the difference?

hot_rod

in this case, it was dirty water

the fluffy steam came from a clean boiler, and was shot first.

The picture with the wet steam was the same water with a couple spoonfuls of cooking oil poured into the boiler. I was duly impressed.

The idea of the header is to be bigger than the combined size of the risers, and bigger than the combined size of the steam mains. It becomes a slow (about 30 mph), lazy, wide spot in the flow to allow the water to drop out and flow back to the boiler through the equalizer.

Notice how full that equalizer is. Make it full size. Keep the header two feet at least above the waterline, in general.

Follow the manufacturer's instructions exactly. You can see why...

Noel

Tim Carlson

Have you skimmed,

and boiled the skimmed water on a stove? It should boil like tap water, with no foaming.

Had a bizzare carry-over problem on a new steam install where the homeowner took one rad out and had it sandblasted without us knowing. Because we didn't know and cap it off, it got a large number of the plastic blasting media lodged inside the rad. Thoose beads melted at steam temp, and acted like oil in the boiler. Every three to four weeks after skimming, it would get so bad, the wet steam would empty the boiler and lock out on low water in a few minutes of run time.

I had to skim 8 times over 5 months until all the beads disolved and were skimmed out.

So your problem may be in the field, and fouling your boiler.

Tim

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