Bolier Room Temperature

Jeff_44

Our house is heated by a 60-plus year old
Weil McClain steam boiler. It runs well (although quite inefficently) and the one pipe system it services runs silently.

The boiler itself is quite large (200,000 btu) and produces enough extraneous heat to keep the whole basement toasty warm. My question is, Is it typical that an old boiler should produce a lot of heat (assuming its insulated properly, etc.) ?

We spend a lot of time in our basement which has no other heat source except the boiler. In the next 1-3 years I plan to replace the old boiler and assume that a new, more effecient one, will not produce (waste) as much heat as our current one does.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Nron_9

Your right if you use a condensing boiler the waste heat to the basement will be nonexsistant do a heat loss on the building before replaceing the boiler system alot of the older systems were way oversized

Constantin

A couple of points...

... I am a fellow homeowner who is currently renting a one-pipe-steam-heated apartment while the house is getting renovated.

Indeed, there is a good chance that a new boiler can be significantly more efficient than an old boiler, that may or may not have been served by coals in the past. However, remember that a steam system is not sized by the heat loss of the house (like a forced-air or hot-water system would be) but rather by the emitting surfaces of your radiators (EDR) and the size and length of your piping (which determines the pickup factor).

So your new boiler may not need to be downsized a great deal. It all depends on the size of the radiator system attached to it.

Now, you can make your system more efficient simply by insulating pipes with fiberglass-based insulation (they have 1.5" thick preformed tubes you can snap around the pipe). Furthermore, as many homeowners have discovered, the pipe system may need some Gorton #2's instead of the Hoffmann 75's that the uninitiated are so fond of replacing older mains vents with.

Once the basement pipes are insulated well, you might find that the basement will cool down significantly, even during periods of heavy use. Also, consider insulating well down there, by sealing all the ceiling penetrations in the basement with insulating foam and/or thermafiber rock wool (in high temp areas).

Another poster here advocated the use of a condensing boiler. I'm not sure that would be cost effective unless fuel becomes far more expensive or you are willing to deal with a lot of work to convert your system from one-pipe steam to two-pipe hot water. It'll be expensive, dusty, etc. though modern materials like PEX make the process a whole lot less painful.

If it were my house, I'd probably stick with the steam, considering how well it is working. I'd use the marginal money left over from not doing the conversion to minimize heat loss by retrofitting insulation into the walls, sealing all penetrations from the conditioned space, doing a blower door test, etc. That money would be better spent, IMHO.

DaveGateway

A new steam boiler

will have a great deal less mass and hold less water then your old unit. You'll probably see less heating of the basement. So insulate all exposed piping. Rigid bats for the basement walls should also help enough so that no extra heating will be needed down there unless it gets very cold for extended periods.

John Cockerill

Are the pipes insulated. You may be getting a lot of the basement heat from exposed piping.