DIY Boiler Installation -- Peerless 63-03

[Boiler slip-and-slide cont'd Sat Aug 31st]

The first step in this endeavour was to lower the boiler onto its back, which was accomplished with a lot of leverage and a long 2x8 on the back side. The boiler was lowered onto an old dolly I built years ago with 2" wheels, which made maneuvering pretty easy. My kitchen floor is thick slate tile, and I was careful to place rosin paper and thin fiber board under the load. Nothing broke or cracked.

I used two twelve-foot long 2x10s, with pieces of 2x4 between them, to build the slide. The boards were braced at the foot of the stairs to the opposite wall to keep them from sliding.

There was enough stair left on either side to be able to walk up and down to aid the load. Straps were looped through the feet of the boiler and provided a place to loop a rope through, with one end stationary. This provided 2:1 leverage and quite a bit of friction to make the job manageable. In the end, the kid did all the lowering, with me guiding the boiler down the stairs. That turned out to be the easiest part of the job.

One important point: I had to shorten the strap loops, since at the point of tilting, the ropes were about to disappear under the boiler, which could have complicated things. See pictures for details.

With the boiler on its back, I put 3" hard rubber casters on its feet. This turned out to be a great idea -- once we had righted the unit, it was easy to push it around like a shopping cart, and it allows fine-tuning the position to match up to the main.

First, some pictures. Here's the view from the half bath opposite the basement door. It's not everyday you sit on the throne trying to control a 350-lb load…

The moment of truth — just before 'tippage.'
Note that the straps around the boiler have been shortened.

..and we're on our way. No pictures were taken "during" the slide process… we had our hands full. As it turned out, the boiler hardly needed any force to keep it from sliding — it was nearly neutral and sometimes had to be nudged to move another inch. The transition off the dolly was the most critical and nerve-wracking time. Overall, I would do it again like this, and probably just build a ramp for the trip from the driveway to the kitchen.

Success!

Now it was easy to get the boiler into position. You can juuust see the edge of the main in the top left corner of the picture.

And of course I couldn't resist a quick test fit. With both risers open, I have to "plug" them somehow anyway, so I'll extend the factory piping with a second riser.

I took today off for some rest and some cooking. Tomorrow will be a long day.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me get this far, and fingers crossed this will be a smooth finish. My goal is to have a hot radiator somewhere in the house by the end of next weekend.

-Matt

» Steel tip nail polish?

Funny.

I take my helpers where I can find them, and young ladies wearing sandals are not allowed close to the action. But I could not have done it without her, that's for sure.

Question: Is it worth trying to degrease the steel piping as I attach it to the boiler? My old system is surely free of oils after many years, but ofc all the pipe I'm buying is coated. Do I try to do something about it, or do I resign myself to skimming a few times?

FWIW, I think there are a lot of standards and rules-of-thumb in this business that have to do with a contractor having to get the job right the first time. As a homeowner, I have the advantage of being able to adjust parameters over time. I'm kind of excited about this job.

-Matt

Quick update — today was a looong day and I'm headed to bed.
Short version, there's been a lot of progress.
Longer version, lots of details to be sorted.

The most vexing one would be this — what on earth is the piece marked with orange? I cannot find it, no idea what I did with it, and I have even less of an idea what it's for. Are these available for sale? Surely a Peerless-specific item. I didn't throw it out, so it's probably somewhere in the mess in the garage, but that sort of thing drives me bonkers.

Other than that, things are going int he right direction. The risers are installed up to the unions. I made them one notch shy of 'farmer tight' so I'm confident they won't leak. And Paul was right, the wiring was easy, and the jacket is back on. More later this week; tomorrow I'll get back to my day job.

Thanks to everyone who commented.

I was pretty stressed about the whole thing, esp getting the boiler into the basement. I believe™ that has been OK; I have yet to do a pressure test of the boiler as it sits. I thought I'd have to send away for more parts to do that — largest diameter piping I can get locally is 2 inches — but Peerless, bless their little hearts, sent plugs for unused riser AND the unused condensate return. Found them last night, they were in the damper box.

I hope to check pressure tonight, plus make a run to Home Depot for some gas piping and a new valve.

@EdTheHeaterMan wrote:

» If you were truly going to emulate @ethicalpaul, there would be some overkill and perhaps a drop header.

You're not wrong, and if it were June, I'd probably do something like a sight glass on the way up to the main. But it's September, and when the inspector shows up, I'll be saying "I got the piping kit from the manufacturer but piped in the second riser" and leave it at that. I'm not trying to have a cool experiment in the basement, but heat upstairs this fall.

Physics is strict. Whatever works in Paul's basement works in mine just the same. With two risers, the steam will definitely be dry and the rest of the piping won't make much difference.

If I didn't have the kit as shown in house already, I would have piped it like you suggested. Nice job on the graphics, BTW, how did you do the fake 2-1/2" union? Looking closely, I think I can kinda see how you cut & pasted & stretched. Cute.

My goal is a heated radiator somewhere in the house before the end of next weekend. I can do that before I finish the water piping, so I'm leaving that for last.

The consensus is that the procedure for filling is to put in 9.3 gallons of tap water and not worry about it.. right? Maybe add Rectorseal soon after? I'd kinda like to do a steam run with just water to see what the condensate looks like.

Wach This Space.

-Matt

» What size wrench are you using on what size pipes?

Three-foot pipe wrench on the big bushings and the 2" pipes that I REALLY want to stay put, like the risers. But that's limited by not wanting to break anything, by my puny strength, and by using the boiler itself as the counter-lever. None of those leaked air.

An 18" pipe wrench on most everything else, and a slightly smaller one on the 1" and 3/4" sizes. Mostly I leave them near the settings I use most.

I put two layers of tape over dope on male threads, plus dope on the end of the female ones for 1-1/4 and larger; Some of the factory fittings were put in with plenty of pipe dope by Peerless; I reused that for the low-water cut-off, since it's not supposed to be taped — I almost didn't remember that. Rectorseal Tru-blu everywhere else.

I plugged one hole dry with a 3/4" nipple and cap, just to see what would happen. And what happened was that it made bubbles. Good to know.

What I really learned is that there are no major leaks on the boiler itself. Heaven forfend. I'll try to hook up gas tonight after work and make sure the burners work as they should. I won't be able to plug all the wet return openings until Friday when a shipment gets here — locally I have only found pipe and fittings up to two inches, and it's predictably all import stuff. I'm sticking with US made where available when I mail-order.

Progress!

A warning up front: a lot of what I did involves bypassing safety features, which is great for understanding, and potentially disastrous in an operational situation. How far to push things is something everyone has to decide for themselves.

I took a vacation day today and made some much-needed progress. The forecast for tonight is 42 degrees, which provides motivation.

I'm still collecting information and working to understand how this boiler actually functions, with the goal of finding problems as early as I can, so I can order parts etc. There's some chicken-and-egg stuff going on, like without water in the boiler, the low-water cut-off (LWCO) just stops things cold, preventing even the vent damper from moving, or the transformer from kicking in.

Using the miracle of amazon, I got myself a logarithmic set of resistors and found the magic number that made the LWCO think we had water. The sweetest sound was the vent damper closing (closing!!) as the power came on with water in the boiler but no heat called for. This is the sort of thing you can only learn by playing with stuff; with power to the LWCO but no water, the damper simply stayed open, which doesn't make sense to me.

I had had an offline interchange with @ethicalpaul about initiating a call-for-heat, which is simply affected by a jumper between the Y and R terminals on the transformer. Without assurance from someone who's done it, I really can't bring myself to jumper 24 V to what is effectively ground, but when I did that and plugged the power back in, I heard another sweet sound: The Piezo for the pilot was kicking in. Since there was no gas connected, this did not get too exciting, but made me think I was headed in the right direction.

So I jerry-rigged gas to the burners using a corrugated line from an old gas stove, which I hooked to a code-compatible valve I'd plumbed in this morning. And when I did: success! For about 7 seconds anyway, because dry firing a cast-iron boiler is not a great idea, so I shut it down immediately. But now I know that all the pieces are working.

Yes, I'm still on wheels. Fastest boiler in the West. I got paving stones at Menard's today and hope to sit on those by tomorrow night. It's a chicken-and-egg thing to get everything lined up properly.

It's incredible how much time it takes to properly tighten all those joints. I've got most but not all the them done, and I haven't even started on the condensate return.

The second riser needs (I believe) a seven-inch nipple at the header, but alas! Menard's does not sell those, and nobody else does either in my neck of the woods. So another Supplyhouse order will be made by Monday morning. Meanwhile I hope to fill and fire up the boiler tomorrow and make some steam with just one riser. The first step is to properly tighten up the wet return so it's water tight.

This business of having to line up things properly implies that for some joints, "needs tightening a little" means "another 360 degrees." I tightened things pretty well and can only hope it holds. Some joints will take stronger arms than mine to go another full turn. All through this job, my respect for the professionals keeps increasing.

Here's the unhygienic side: Both the electrical and the gas are hooked up in a way that means I don't leave the room when the power is on. On the other hand, this has been instrumental in understanding the system. I feel closer to my goal of a hot radiator somewhere in the house by Sunday night — after hooking up the vent, of course.

-Matt