Steam to Hot water

Michael_17

I have pictures of the boiler and piping at the boiler. We were not able to get inside the building to look at the rads etc. The home is in Eugene Oregon at the UofO campus area. Is it possible to show pictures on this forum?
I am in the research phase of this project and am trying to get as much advise and recommendation as I can before preparing a proposal. Thanks again for any tips and advice on this. Michael

Michael_17

Steam to Hot water

Are their advantages to converting an early 1900's steam system to hot water. This is a 2-pipe type system which is in an old 1906 home being used as an apartment house. 6 units one t-stat and over heating (windows open 30 degrees outside). The home owner would like to upgrade and increase efficiency, this keeps his historic registry cost's fixed if he shows improvement. I have not seen any residential steam boilers in the 90 percent catagory.
Any help on this or other idea's of increasing efficiency would be a great help. The boilers is an old sawdust burner converted to gas. about 400k btu. Thanks for any advice you can give. Michael

Steamhead

I wouldn't convert it

there are too many things that can go wrong. For a discussion of these, go here:

http://www.heatinghelp.com/newsletter.cfm?Id=22

I have found that it's much easier and cost-effective to fix steam systems rather than convert them. Doing so will lower the owner's operating costs without a huge outlay and potential problems. Many problems such as over-heating can be fixed without even replacing the boiler, although a new boiler will be more efficient.

Tell us more about this system. Is it a 2-pipe air-vent system with shutoffs on radiator returns as well as supplies, and a vent on each rad, or Vapor with a shutoff on rad supply only and a trap or water seal on the rad outlet? Have you located any manfacturer's names on any of the system's hardware (other than rads) that can help us identify it? Where is the job located?

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Steamhead

Posting Pics

When you click on the Reply button and the form coms up, click Attachments.

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Steamhead

Posting Pics

When you click on the Reply button and the New Message form comes up, click Attachments. The Edit Attachments form appears. Click the Browse button to navigate to the folder where the pics are stored. Select the one you want, click Add, and the file name will appear in the lower box. You can add several pics to one posting. Click OK to return to the New Message form. If you want to have a pic automatically display with your post, click the check box next to the file name. When you've finished typing in your post, click Post.

The attached files work best in JPEG format. You should shrink them down to about 25% of the usual 8.5 X 11 size so they'll be easier to look at and take less time to load. The latter is important to those of us who still use dial-up connections.

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