Interesting steam article

John R. Hall

I guess Dan's seminar has me thinking a lot more about steam these days. This article appeared in todays (5/16) Detroit News. I think it is interesting for a few reasons.

Whenever I think of downtown Detroit I picture steam rising from manholes. Call me silly and nostalgic but I would hate to see that sight disappear. I know the hazards of it but maybe a little leakage would be okay, as suggested in the article. I also found it interesting that the writer said the 1903 system is still the cheapest and most efficient means of heating buldings in a dense urban area.

Who knows -- will steam make a comeback?

http://www.detnews.com/2004/business/0405/16/c01-153877.htm

John R. Hall

Pros and cons

I guess Dan's seminar has me thinking a lot more about steam these days. This article appeared in todays (5/16) Detroit News. I think it is interesting for a few reasons.

Whenever I think of downtown Detroit I picture steam rising from manholes. Call me silly and nostalgic but I would hate to see that sight disappear. I know the hazards of it but maybe a little leakage would be okay, as suggested in the article. I also found it interesting that the writer said the 1903 system is still the cheapest and most efficient means of heating buldings in a dense urban area.

Who knows -- will steam make a comeback?

http://www.detnews.com/2004/business/0405/16/c01-153877.htm

John R. Hall

Pros and cons

I guess Dan's seminar has me thinking a lot more about steam these days. This article appeared in todays (5/16) Detroit News. I think it is interesting for a few reasons.

Whenever I think of downtown Detroit I picture steam rising from manholes. Call me silly and nostalgic but I would hate to see that sight disappear. I know the hazards of it but maybe a little leakage would be okay, as suggested in the article. I also found it interesting that the writer said the 1903 system is still the cheapest and most efficient means of heating buldings in a dense urban area.

Who knows -- will steam make a comeback?

http://www.detnews.com/2004/business/0405/16/c01-153877.htm

DaveGateway

Steam Plants

When I see steaming manholes I think of "Taxi Driver" and those eerie night shots of DeNiro driving around NYC.
I don't know how old the University of Chicago steam plant is but it's been heating all those great gothic campus buildings for a long time.

I'm not surprised that it's still an efficient way to heat multiple large buildings. The dead men strike again.

Here's a pic of the U of C plant and a cool animated thing from the Missouri University steam plant.

DaveGateway

Ooops!

I guess that didn't work. Try these. The flash animation takes a speedy computer.

http://maps.uchicago.edu/southeast/steam.html

http://www.cf.missouri.edu/energy/emflash/index.stm

Steamhead

Of course it will, John

The big advantage of steam over hot-water is that there is far less danger of freezing pipes. The only pipes that have water in them all the time are the wet returns in the basement, and of course the boiler itself. In an uncertain energy future, with electricity that can fail at any time, this is a crucial advantage.

We've all seen how well steam can work when properly set up. It's true that not many contractors know how to do this, but the success of this site shows that number is increasing.

And with people like Noel, Mad Dog, Ed Bratton, Dan Foley and myself who have installed steam from scratch, I don't think steam is a dying art.

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DaveGateway

Imagine the elecrric savings..

by piping steam around campus or around the city from a central plant rather than pumping hot water. It's certainly cost effective to keep these systems in operation, not just to save any retrofit expeses, they operate more efficiently. Even chilled water AC additions over the years run side by side with the steam.

Did you see the post from the Mich. HO whose gas bill was 1/2 of his scorched air neighbors.

David Efflandt

Wisconsin Electric steams Milwaukee

Wisconsin Electric (if still called that) pipes the waste steam from their electric generators to heat buildings around downtown Milwaukee. It has to be hot enough coming out of the turbines to not condense under pressure in the turbine, so they need some way to condense it (better than heating the lake).

I looked up inside of one of those huge multi-story boilers in the early 70's when shut down (to repair copper tubes lining inside). There is also a window to see compustion in action (coal, supplemented by fuel oil when downfired for less electrical demand).

Weezbo

We just gotta point out some other benifits.....

we have steam ,laid in many years back in the burg.I keep nagging at various corners of the powers that be to use the heat to do hydrophonic gardening all year round,do a form of snow melt at major intersections heat the sidewalks,fish farming. etc.. why not? we have old coal fired steamers and hey! its doable. right the first Time:)

Tony Conner

District Heating Systems

The brick building in the centre of the shot is likely old enough that it had steam heat. Newer ones (or ones that have been modified), usually have hot water heating. They can (and do) use central steam systems, through heat exchangers.

What appear to be leaks, should be vents of condensate tanks, or condensate from a trap discharging to a sewer. There should be NO leaks on the steam lines, except for the odd recently discovered one. It can take a while to schedule a repair, as you often have to arrange to shut down a number of buildings, and dig up the street. This usually makes you EXTEMELY unpopular. If you let leaks go though, you risk cooking electical services, phone lines, fibre-optic cables, traffic light power and control circuits - all kinds of neat stuff. If you think you're unpopular digging to repair a leak, let it heat the ground up for a month or two...

There are big hot water systems like the steam system in Detroit. They work well, and there are pluses and minuses for both. Steam systems have to have line traps every few hundred feet. This can be awkward. Also, steam system manholes are just a brutal environment - the most brutal I've ever seen. If something'll stand up in a steam manhole, this thing is just about bullet proof. Hot water system manholes are much more benign. The difference shows up on big maintenance jobs, or tie-ins. Steam you can just vent. An hour or so, a couple of noise complaints, and the line is depressurized. Away you go. Hot water... often a city block of two sometimes BIG lines - maybe 14" or 16" pipe - full of water at say, 350*F. Where are you draining THAT? The people that look after the city sewers become very excited at the prospect of you sending all of the VERY hot water down their catchbasins. I've heard of operations that just dumped it in the middle of a sidestreet, mixing with water from some fire hydrants and calculated repaving the street into the cost of the job. There's really not much else they could do. Oh ya, and no matter which type of system it is, you usually have from 11 PM Saturday night to 7 AM Sunday morning to get it shut down, depressurized/drained, do your work, and have it back on line and up to pressure/temperature.

On the upside, you get to meet some really "interesting" people in a downtown urban environment between 1 and 5 AM on Sunday morning

Christian Egli

Steam a come back? It never left

From the very beginning steam (using the energy stored and released in the reversible transformation between water and steam) has been the only effective way to carry heat by the bucket load.

That's just physics. There are no other practical fluids and gases that come close. Carrying heat with hydronic hot water is like using a tea spoon instead of a tanker car. As far as relying on forced air to move heat, it's like using a sieve, hopeless.

Steam is used to this day in every aspect of our lives. Think of food processing plants, chemical plants, and of course electric plants, coal, nuclear or solar all work with water and steam. And they are all here to stay.

You're lucky if your home has steam heat.

Constantin

Interesting

The Russians use liquid-sodium-cooled nuclear reactors in their attack submarines... Allegedly, the performance increase over steam justified the incredible risk of using liquid sodium in a potentially wet and nuclear environment. Who wants to volunteer to work on that system?

Having said that, you're absolutely correct in observing that steam is probably one of the most cost effective ways to transport a lot of heat energy using relatively simple controls.

I'm glad that I don't have to work in a Russian sub. Nuclear or not. Even US subs probably get on peoples nerves after a while. Just imagine months without the Wall... the withdrawl symptoms would be pretty intense.

Christian Egli

Sodium for that special sailor glow

We have a sodium nuclear plant here in Ohio, it just went back online after a few years of repair. It was found that the sodium had corroded the system a whole lot more than was expected.

I think most reactors are cooled with heavy water, it is not just tap water it is water made with modified atoms that contain more neutrons, if I remember correctly. These cooling fluid flow around the uranium rods and should not interfere or carry away radiation. In the case of the heavy water, it is not turned into steam within the reactor, it's superheated water at very high pressure. The advantage of sodium is that it does not require such high pressure for the same temperature. After all, sodium at room temperature is a solid, but soft, metal.

That's inside the reactor where the radioactive stuff is. Then the special reactor cooling fluid flows through a heat exchanger - the steam boiler were ordinary water is made to steam and then piped to the steam turbines. The turbines do not sit reactor concrete dome.

Steamhead

Many American power reactors

including the Babcock & Wilcox #177 that so nearly melted down at Three Mile Island, are cooled with ordinary ("light") water- under about 2,100 PSI so it "won't" boil. Yet that's exactly what happened on that fateful day in 1979.

The story is very interesting. It was turned into a very good book called "The Warning"- I don't remember who wrote it. You might be able to find a copy at www.abebooks.com .

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