Near Boiler Piping Questions

Could you take a few more photos from further back? Also a few different angles of the piping above and beside the boiler.

The biggest problem I see is that the "header" doesn't go straight into the equalizer, so it won't remove entrained droplets, if any exist. The height of the riser should prevent carryover, but at high steam velocity, there might still be entrained droplets, and these droplets would be more likely to continue out the main than into the equalizer, because that's the way the "wind" would be blowing them. The header should go straight into the equalizer, and the supply riser should come off vertically at a right angle. This causes the droplets to go into the equalizer because of their inertial mass while the steam is able to turn the corner and go on up to your radiators. As it is, the droplets would tend to splatter against the bull of the tee, then get blown along with the steam into the mains.

the heats good and no noise? and you want to fix what? I think i'd find other more important issues and work on this one later if i was bored...

RDG151 said:

Thanks for the replies, everyone. I'll be buying The Lost Art asap.
My thought was to re-do the piping if there were utility savings or it would correct some other issue. The current configuration doesn't have swing joints (right?), and the riser is less than the minimum recommended by peerless. And there's really no header. Just intuitively, this must be wasting fuel... right?

You only need swing joints when you have both risers connected to the header. The purpose of swing joints is to allow the boiler sections and header to expand and contract independently of each other. This is important because the boiler heats up and expands before the steam rises into the header and causes it to expand, and the boiler also stays hot longer after the cycle ends. Also, cast iron and steel have different thermal expansion coefficients. Without swing joints, the heating and cooling cycles would put excessive stress on the piping and, more importantly, on the connections between the boiler sections.

RDG151 said:

So now I'm wondering what the function of a header is, and is one required in a single main system?

The purpose of the header is to deliver dry steam by separating the steam from any water that has gotten caught up in the flow of the steam (called entrainment) or condensed from the steam in the risers and header at the beginning of the cycle. It does this by exploiting the differences in the physical properties of water and steam.
Water is heavier than air, and steam is lighter than air, so it should be pretty easy to separate them by density. The trouble is, the steam moves really fast—faster than you can really appreciate until you see a demo of a boiler with glass piping—so small water droplets can get blown along in the racing current of steam. So the first thing a header does is to slow down the steam by providing a larger cross-sectional area, allowing a large volume of steam to flow at a relatively low velocity. This allows the droplets to fall to the bottom of the header, which is slanted towards the distal end, which is connected to a vertical pipe called the equalizer that allows the water to drain into the boiler.
Additionally, entrained droplets that don't fall out of the stream tend to move in a straight line towards the equalizer, because of inertia, while the lighter steam exits the header into the system risers connected to the top of the header.
A header is required regardless of how many system risers and mains are connected to it. In fact, it's more important with a single main, because the steam velocity in that main has to be pretty high if it's supplying steam to every radiator in your house, so you'd better make sure the steam is really dry before it reaches the main.