Venting doesn't seem right

Jim Bach

The building is an old apartment building which has gone condo. We currently have wildly different heating rates in the building (on the order of 7-10 degrees). It's a one pipe steam system.

Two buildings are involved, one which has the boiler (Building A) itself, another about 60 feet on down from the boiler (Building B). The steam main is a six inch cast iron which runs the length of Building A (60 feet) then reduces to a three inch pipe and into building B.

After a lot of guesswork, I've noticed we have two Gorton #2's on the return from building B to Building A, but only one Maid O Mist #1 squirlled away on an off shoot branch of the main steam pipe in Building A.

During the conversion, it looks like they capped most of the radiator offshoots the main steam line in building A. Worse, the people in building A turn off their radiators due to excessive heat.

Am I right in thinking we need some air venting added in Building A? You can hear air release, but the steam is taking way too long to travel.

Steamhead

You need more venting

and it should all be at the end of the main in building B. If the current Gorton #2 vents are at or near the point where the steam main in building B ends, this is the right place for them. The overheating in building A results from the steam being slow to travel into building B.

You will certainly need more Gorton #2 vents. By my calculation you need three of these vents just to vent the air in building A. How much pipe comes out of building A and runs thru building B as far as the end of the main? And is it all three-inch?

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Jim Bach

There are no main vents in building B as far as I can tell. There's no basement in building B, we're relying solely on radiator venting in building B.

They seemed to have done the covnersion with literally no attention to the heating system.

We're not going for perfection, just want the steam to move around. Since there are no vents on the steam main as it leaves the boiler, that seems like a good place to start.

Steamhead

Is there a way

to measure the main in building B, maybe a crawlspace? If not, we could estimate its length by measuring the building's perimeter.

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