Help with a challenge

Jon_2

Sorry, I do not have a digital camera nor access to one. Maybe if I am real good and somehow let the little woman know what I want, Santa will bring me one. Jon

Rich Jones

Help with a challenge

We are currently looking at a project for a boiler replacement at Sorg Mansion in Middletown, Ohio. It is a 12,000 sq. ft. mansion built by Paul Sorg a multimillionaire that made his money in the tobacco industry. The mansion was built in 1887. There are 2 old boilers in a separate building about 200 ft. behind the mansion. They were coal fired boilers that were converted to natural gas a long time before I started working on them 14 yrs. ago. One of the boilers has been abandoned for years and the mansion has heated fine on one boiler. This leads me to believe that due to his status the second boiler was for 100% redundancy. I have worked on all types of hydronis systems but I have never seen one quite like this. In the basement of the Mansion there are about 10 of what looks like masonary chimmneys. After sticking my head into what I thought was a cleanout door in the bottom I looked up and seen what looks like cast iron boiler sections. What I thought was chimmneys are actually masonary chases throughout the building with these cast iron radiators that look like boiler sections built inside them. There is also sheet metal return ducting into each section of chase. The whole system turns out to be a hybrid system consisting of a steam boiler feeding the radiators and a gravity forced air system through the chases supplying the heat to the rooms. Now for my problem. I know the new boiler only needs to be sized to match my radition. The cast iron radiators are built into the masonary chases and are not reachable at all. How do we determine the radition if we cant measure the radiators. Also the steam piping that is in the ground from the boiler building to the mansion is shot and they want to install the new boiler in the mansion itself. It is a 2 pipe system with modern traps. My steam main is 8 inch black iron pipe. The boiler that we are looking at calls for 2-4 inch risers into a 6 inch header. Will going into the 8 inch mains kill my velocity. If I did my calculations right and if my boiler is big enough my velocity will about 14 is that to slow. Any sugession on how to do my boiler sizing will be happily accepted. Thanks in advance.
Rich
PS- If you want to take a look at the Mansion run a search on Dogpile.com for Sorg Mansion.

jim lockard

Nice rich

You my get every wethead in Ohio wanting to tour the building.
"Hauntings of Ohio" website say the building has its ghosts have you consulted with them to maybe "earn their keep"?
Best Wishes J. Lockard

Mike T., Swampeast MO

This might help...

Sounds like some kind of weird indirect system where individual indirect rads were used for each room with a common "flue".

Typical indirect systems find the rads near the ceiling in the basement built into sheet metal "boxes" and open outlets at each room on each floor served by its "flue".

Those "radiators" in the chases have some WHOPPING output due to the relatively high velocity of air flowing over them. Output depends on height of the "flue", its size and construction. With multiple rads in a flue it would get really strange as not only would the air velocity increase with height, but likely its temperature as well.

BUT it seems that the dead men (after setting velocity, determining construction for this velocity and determining output at this velocity) converted this number into an equivalence of DIRECT radiation for sizing the pipes.

SO...if I've picked the correct table (Capacities of Steam Mains, Branches and Risers [sub] Up-Feed Supply Risers [sub] Two-Pipe Gravity, Vapor and Vacuum Systems) for this system you should be able to estimate radiation based on the size of the pipes feeding them...

1¼" -- 120 sq.ft.

1½" -- 190 sq.ft.

2" -- 385 sq.ft.

2½" -- 635 sq.ft.

3" -- 1165 sq.ft.

3½" -- 1735 sq.ft.

4" -- 2460 sq.ft.

Again, this WON'T provide an estimate of the surface area of the indirect rads themselves, but a rough equivalence of standard, direct steam radiation.

Mike T., Swampeast MO

One other thing...

...I believe Biltmore estate in Asheville, NC used a similar system for heating the ground floor and the big common rooms on the upper floors. The guest suites themselves (2 bedrooms, a parlor and 1 or two baths) seem to have been heated with fireplaces and "sympathetic" heat from the big common "meeting rooms" around which a number of these suites were clustered.

It seemed rather "primitive" and HIGHLY labor-intensive compared to other systems used by the very rich around the turn of the 20th century.

I took the "mechanical tour" of the mansion as well and had a tendency to keep wondering off and/or gawking. Not many velvet ropes in the sub-basement...

Rich Jones

After getting the keys and spending more time in the basement came to find there art 25 of these chases and there seems to be 39 individual convectors inside these chases. All convectors are 1 1/2 steam liness in and out then to 3/4 steam traps and 3/4 pipe back to 4" condensate returns. The more we look the curiouser it gets.

Earthfire

Roadtrip

sounds like a perfect candidate for a wethead road trip

Jon_2

Heat risers

At the Psych. Center where I work, we have the same type systems. The buildings were built in the late 1800's, beautiful huge massive structures. All of the heat risers are located on the perimeter of the buildings and are 2 to 3 stories in height. There is an outside air chase to each one of the basement steam horizional coils. The cast iron coils are 4' to 6' sq.. The heat riser duct is usually 3' sq. and has an damper outlet on each floor. They are spaced appox. 15' apart. They are fed all winter with 15 psi steam. The only temp. control is opening and closing the windows. Even when it 20 to 30 below zero, I have never seen any of these older buildings with all the windows closed. You can usually tell the temp outside by looking at the windows in the old buildings, 0 degrees and above, all windows wide open, 0 to -10 3/4 open, -10 to -20 1/2 open and so on. The psych center is located next to the St. Lawrence River in northern NY. ("uppa us" i call it.) Presently we are in the process of closing down all of the 1880-90 buildings, in some ways it is a shame, for they are beaufully constructed. Jon

Jim_22

Can you post

Pictures?

Everyone loves pictures here!