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Condensate tank construction

EBEBRATT-Ed
EBEBRATT-Ed Member Posts: 16,237
No different here. Have one at our company. Not a P.E. but is the "DESIGN ENGINEER" and don't question anything he design's.

Comments

  • Jack Ennis Martin
    Jack Ennis Martin Member Posts: 35
    Condensate tank construction

    I work for a large organization and as such we produce the second most steam for heating in the Province of Manitoba. We have ,as you can imagine, a lot of condensate tanks both primary and secondary holding tanks pumping back into the main tank in the boiler room. A number of years ago, whenever a condensate tank would hole { they were all black mild steel} the engineer { no degree } would get hold of the local fibreglass fabricator and have a tank molded out of shot fibreglass over a wooden mold. I have not to this day seen a worse blunder. The tank would hold up until the eventual blowing steam trap ;the tank would then be recieving steam instead of water and could not take the temperature. The total number of traps is in the low thousands. The tank would literally begin to decompose. An area of first failure was always around the pipe bungs ,you would get a wet,sticky, brown mess coming down from the fitting site. The tank would also begin to deposit fibregalss residue into the boilers and cause priming problems ,as you would expect. They had approximately fifteen of these tanks made and they all went the same way :breakdown and failure. I had the bright idea, after speaking with other people in the industry to make the tanks out of 316 stainless 14 gauge and all required bungs etc. on the tank proper 316. I also had the maufactuerer{Parr Metal Fabricators} install a sump area into the bottom of the tank and a two inch bung for cleaning out of the tank in the down period. I am happy to say it worked well and we had no more failures of tanks before their time. It was comical at the time; the person who waa so adament about the superior attributes of fibreglass, insisted the stainless tanks were going to be so much more expensive to produce. In actual fact,the stainless tank was cheaper:why, because no wooden form had to be made first for the fibreglass to be shot onto, you simply rolled the stainless ,added two end plates, welded in the bungs ,sump area and made two cradles for the tank to sit on. I am a person who is very stuck ;if you will, on people being educated to do what they claim they can do. In our area ,for a long time ,we had pseudo engineers. People who, for whatever reason ,had not been able to finish University to be accredited Engineers:but, still got jobs as technical people in sales and engineering firms. Hence, you make condensate tanks out of fibreglass and pay the bill three times instead of once. Sorry, my rant for the day. Hope this may stop someone from running thier heads into the same problems and costing yourself alot of trouble and headaches.
    Jack Ennis Martin
  • Tony Conner_2
    Tony Conner_2 Member Posts: 443
    Regardless Of...

    ... whatever anyone's background or training, PE or not, if they haven't SPECIFICALLY studied the fluid that is "steam", and how it will behave in their particular application, there will be trouble.
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