Dan & Wallies (Steam Problems)

Jamie_6

Dan & The Wallies!

Yesterday I went on a Steam Survey (A Find A Professional lead) and found, as usual a pretty bad steam install that is only three years old!

• Header was only 14” off of the water line

• When they installed the new boiler they tied all the old mains together with bull nose tees.

• They removed a return elbow off of an old radiator which had a thermostatic trap in it and replaced it with a normal elbow.

• And worst of all they did not do a load on the radiantion, they did a load on the house. The total EDR on the entire house is 1250 the boiler they have is a Weil McLain EG-75 which is about 800 EDR.

• They removed and plugged the vents that where on the dry returns.

• They added vents onto the radiators.

Any ideas on what direction we should head in?

Jamie


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Unknown

the door....

Add a boiler and pipe it right, or start over.

Noel

Boilerpro_3

If the boiler is big enough to provide the BTU's

to heat the building, I'd do a room by room heat loss and install orifice plates in the radiator supply valves to match the radiation to each rooms load. You have then effectively removed the unnecessary radiation and will give thenm a much more efficient system becasue the boiler and system will be matched to the current buildings needs.
I am working with a couple of systems right now which we are implementing this setup. I hope to be reporting back in the spring. It should work just fine since many old vapor systems (IE. Moline systems)were set up this way...radiators oversized with an orifice plate limiting the radiation the boiler "sees".
As a temporary fix, you can simply throttle back the valves in the rooms that are warm or too warm to direct the steam to rooms that are cold, if this a problem. Since the mains are oversized for the boiler, you will probably be running vapor pressure instead of steam, so distribution may get very quick.
You can probably make a silk purse out of a sows ear with a little work.

Boilerpro

Steamhead

I think BP may have a good solution

but if you're going to have to repipe the boiler anyway it might make more sense to change it. The old one could be donated to a charity.

We need to get a better handle on how the system will behave. I'd start by fixing the system- remove radiator vents, install proper vents on steam mains & dry returns, put the trap back on that one radiator, etc. and see what happens. If BP's way works, you can buy him a case of beer ;-)

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Jamie_6

BoilerPro,

I never knew you could do something like that. Where would you get such an orifice? I guess you would need to determine the required BTU for each room, the total EDR of each radiator, the orifice size for each radiator according to each room. WOW!

I can see how it would be extremely green friendly going about it this way. And it would also reduce operating costs for the homeowner.

Also, how do you install these orifices? You must have to install a special radiator valve?

Jamie


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Boilerpro_3

Ideas

I have been messing with these ideas since I worked on a Moline sytem a few years ago, unfortunately steam isn't so common round here so I don't have many "labs" to work in. Tunstall has the plates, I understand, and I believe they are just inserted in the supply valve union.

What you end up doing is designing the system from sratch, which I'm sure you've done many times.....the only difference is that you have to figure your EDR needs for each room just like figuring your feet of baseboard in a fintube system.

I really think this should be the way we are heading when replacing boilers on old oversized two pipe systems, I suspect alot of the cost of redesigning the system would be made up for in the savings of installing a usually much, much smaller heating plant. The rest would probably be recouped in a few years savings on heating bills.

Boilerpro

Steamhead

Jamie, you may not even need

orifice plates. Many Vapor hand valves had orificing capability built in. All you'd need to do is either adjust the orifices, or reduce the pressure to allow less steam to pass the orifices.

Which Vapor system is this?

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Jamie_6

I'm leaning towards a Richardson or The O-E System. Although, I did not find a vacuum breaker or exhauster on the system. Most likely it is an O-E. Because the ball (bearing) came out easily.

The valves where pretty peculiar looking. I've never seen them before. They had a handle on one side and a point on the other! One side said off the other open and it only moved about 180%.


Jamie

Side note: Have you ever disassembled the valve on a Veco system and re-lubricated it? How hard is it to do and what lubrication do you use?

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