Steam Radiators not heating.

Joshua Berne

There are no main vents as far as i can tell :( I also don't have a 'steam' setting for the thermostat from what i can see. At this point though for the last 2 days it hasn't even been able to get heated up enough for the thermostat to cycle off.

I'll see what i can do about changing the pressure.. and look into finding someone to upgrade/replace our valves. Thanks for the replies.

Joshua Berne

Steam Radiators not heating.

Last week all the steam radiators in our house were warming up and keeping things toasty. It got much colder on friday, and now half of the radiators (the front 2 of 4 major vertical stacks) are just cold to the touch, and hissing a _lot_. We haven't really touched the system since buying the house other than a new thermostat, and the chilliness is starting to get to us. Can anyone help?

Pete_18

main vents

Sounds like you need main vents or if you have main vents, they aren't good enough or aren't functioning (clogged?). Basically without main vents, your poor radiator vents are going to fail to get air out of the system. When they can't vent fast enough, they won't heat up. Test the theory by taking the radiator vent off on one of the radiators that won't heat up and see if it heats up.

A temporary workaround may be a Varivalve Heat-timer set to max open or a Gorton D (or perhaps C) vent on the radiators not heating up, but without properly functioning main vents, your radiators will never be quiet and your house will never heat equally.

When I first got my 1-pipe steam system a few months ago it would hiss like you wouldn't believe and would heat the house terribly, just like you are describing. Do you have 1-pipe or 2-pipe steam radiators?

Between proper main vents (the folks on the board can tell you what you need if you let them know what size pipes you have for your mains, lengths and current vents / if any), main insulation and better radiator vents (Gortons and Varivalves), my system now heats pretty equally and you don't even know it's turned on (no more hissing as the radiator chokes on air that can't vent out fast enough).

Pete_18

pressuretrol

http://www.heatinghelp.com/steam_problems.cfm

See excerpts from Dan's book for other helpful suggestions.

In addition - one other one to look at is your pressuretrol, it should be set to .5 on the cut-in (visible with the cover on) and when you pull the cover off, a max of 1 on the DIFF setting. If it's set to something higher, this is going to make your radiator vents work much harder and make things take longer to heat. This is in no way a replacement for good main vents and proper radiator vents, but may be signs of additional misconfigurations with your system over years of neglect.

Pete_18

your thermostat

I meant to ask you. Not that this has anything to do with your current issues, but you'll want to make sure you set up your thermostat to the STEAM setting as it states in the manual. On the manual thermostats this is done with an anticipator setting, on the digital ones, mine had a few dip switches.

Bob W._3

Describe your system if you can. Is this one pipe or two pipe steam (1 or 2 pipes to each radiator). If possible post a couple of pictures of your boiler, the piping near your boiler, and one of the radiators. All this will help.

Pete_18

Where are you located?

I know the feeling, I was in your situation a few months ago. It felt hopeless at the time, but I learned quickly that this is a process and you just need to work your way through the process to make your system work the way that it was intended to work.

There are some good professionals in the Boston area (and all over the place) from the Find a Professional link.

I learned this a few months ago - get main vents, get Gorton's and have someone with a clue install them (not just a yellow pages knucklehead). No main vents were fine with a coal fired system that ran non-stop 24x7, but simply won't work right for a Gas/Oil system that cycles.

If you go to your basement and follow the big pipes all the way to the end, you should see main vent(s) towards the end right before it drops down to the ground to become a return.

Your problems are some of the same ones that I ran in to with my 1903 neglected 1-pipe steam system that barely worked when we moved in a few months ago. The old owners paid a fortune to keep the house 'heated' at 55 degrees for 30 years.

Post the width of your mains and lengths and even a picture of the end of your mains and someone can chime in to let you know how many Gorton 1s or whether a Gorton 2 would be best on them.

In order I would:

1. Check your radiator vents, let us know what type are (make/model). You may be able to at least make the system functional (though not well) until you get some main vents if your radiator vents can vent enough air. I recommend some angle Varivalve heat-timers (they're adjustable) or Gorton C/Ds for some of your radiators that won't heat in the mean time and are hissing like crazy. At least try taking off the radiator vent first when the system is on and if the radiator heats up nicely then you have hope that better vents may help a little until you can get some main vents. Here, most of my radiator vents had been painted over, rendering them useless. Good vents must be purchased from a plumbing supply store, they are not sold at Home Depot.

2. Get main vents and the right sized ones. This is the key to getting your system to heat equally and properly. If you read the eBook put together by Gerry Gill and Steve Pajek for sale online here it's pretty obvious that you only want Gorton 1s or 2s for your main vents or else you'll need way too many garbage main vents

3. Make sure your pressuretrol is set up right, if you need help identifying it, let us know. It probably says Honeywell on it and says cut-in on the front and should look like it's set to .5 (hopefully) and then a wheel instead that says DIFFerential and is hopefully set to around 1 (not 2,3,4,5 or higher). If your pressuretrol is way out of whack, this is causing you to perhaps vent even more air out of your poor radiator vents.

4. Make sure your mains are insulated. On mine they were nice enough to remove the asbestos, but didn't bother to reinsulate it. It cost a few hundred $$s of money and some hours to reinsulate them myself (1 in. fiberglass insulation). The basement is now 50 degrees cooler than it was before and this helped get heat to the radiator vs. the basement.

Pete_18

thermostat make/model

What make/model thermostat did you buy? If it does not have an anticipator or a setting of dipswitches for cycles that specifically let you deal with the right settings for a steam heat system, this will not be good in the long run. Your system will cycle on/off way too quickly because it is thinking you have a forced hot air system. This is what happened to me originally, my thermostat would cycle the burner on and off constantly.

This has nothing to do with your current problem, but you really want to make sure that you have a thermostat that specifically has a setting (or anticipator) that lets you adjust it properly for steam.

Joshua Berne

Answers

Wow, lots of answers... let me provide more information as i can. (I just discovered my camera is out of batteries.. so while it recharges i'll answer in text, and hopefully post pictures later.)

The thermostat is a proliphix nt20e (http://www.proliphix.com/NT20e.aspx). It has options under "hvac system type" for "fuel burner" and "heat pump".. and that's the closest i can find to configuring it for heating system type. It seems to not do anything more than cycle on/off based on the temp, so i don't think that's an issue.

The system is a 1 pipe steam system, in a 100 year old house in brooklyn new york. There are also hot-water baseboards in the basement hooked into the same boiler, but the thermostat that controls the circulator pump for that is set really low and it isn't going on, so hopefully that's not the issue here.

I went down to look at the pressuretrol and noticed a few things. Both the main and diff are visible on it, and i'm not sure which units to set them in. The main runs from 0-1 on the left, (KG/cm^3?) and 2-30 on the right (psi). Should i drop it down as low as it can go to be at .5 psi? Or jack it halfway up the bar to .5 on the other gauge? Same basic question for the differential setting.

On another note, there is a light on a control box sticking out of the boiler that says "low water" which seems to keep going on, and that might be my problem. However, when looking at hte water guage (i assume the glass thing with dirty water and valves at the top and bottom) i'm a little cluessless as to how to effect any change. I tried opening and closing the top and bottom valves, but nothing seemed to happen to the water levels when i did eitehr of those things.

The pipes in the basement are mostly insulated.


update - after going to check on things, i watched the boiler for a few minutes and saw that it woudl cycle on, and then cycle off after less than a minute when the low water light went on. I then discovered the manual water feeding valve and used that to fill the water up (after discovering the drain valve and using that to empty even more water into a bucket.) I took the chance to drain the water till it ran clear, and then filled it up till the water guage was halfway up (which the instructions seem to imply is the right water level to go for.) Hopefully that was the problem... There is a "water feeder" in parallel with the manual water refilling valve, and woudl i be right to guess that it's potentially the culprit here, not refilling the boiler when it should have been?

If the water level fix didn't work then i'll try to get some pictures to describe things up later (as i wait for my camera to charge.)

- Josh