building false water line info.

clammy

Very recently replaced a split weil 976 steamer she was a little over 20 .The unit was a steel weld header job with take offs in the center of the riser and a 2 inch equilizer and hart ford loop the existing 4 and 3 inch wet returns where bushed down to 2 inch and that was only the 2 nd boiler to the house .I realized the there might be some loop seals on the returns that where not wet any more and my guess was rightand hadn,t been for twenty years so now i want to fix this deal with building a false water line and what i need to know is what size pipe do i use for the equilizer to the loop ? And does the location of where i take that off matter or in other words can i branch off a header riser or am i better off cuting a new tee off of my header ,any input and advice would be helpfull.The home owner never said a word until about it until the end when he said this one won't flood right at least i knew there where corrective actions to take .Also there was no way to raise the boiler up to the old water line given the time frame and weather plus building a block platform 24 high would not have gotten them heat any faster and as hard as it is to believe the system is very quite the bishop babcock electric selector switch box vacume pump and tank are there still with 1/8 vacume lines running to the convector rads and standard rads it's a one pipe with all risers dripped thanks for any input .peace clammy

Jamie_6

Clammy,

When we built our false water line for this job we used Dan's "Steam School Workbook", Peerless' "Color Of Steam Workbook", and Peerless' "Steam Surey Workbook." None of them really told us what size piping to use but they did show us where all the piping belongs and where to install the air-vent.

Hope this info. helps!

Jamie

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clammy

excellent work

Beautiful piping work all plumb and square ace job .On the job in question the equilizer and hartford loop and wet returns are 3 inch so my guess is to do the whole manifold in 3 inch and pull a 4 nipple out before my drop to the hartford loop and put a 4 x 3 tee in and run it to the colume for the loop equilizer and bring my wet return up to 4 inches below the false water line level and put the cross over tee with the supply equilizer above i think i,m on the right track .The a dimension was like 64 inches and i belive the false water line was only about 16 inches above the boiler water line .The funny thing about it is the old boiler ran for 20 years flooding probably from the first day it ran and the guys just piped the skim with a gate valve right across the room to a floor drain and told the ho that it was normal for these new smaller boilers the old boiler was pretty huge from what i'm told. Figures first time i,m there it's cause this pit room is flooded the the boiler is totally crack every section and all in different places steel welded header with no compaion flanges .At the time i had my t6houghs about the water line and knew that the replacement team of 20 years ago didn,t even give it a thought so now i'll hopefully straighten this system out and put the loop seals back on those old drips and drip returns and stop the boiler from flooding thanks peace clammy