DIY Boiler Installation -- Peerless 63-03

» With all that said steam is a set it and forget it system. Set backs are discouraged, which limits a connected t-stats utility.

I came to that conclusion years ago also. Setback produced an awful lot of banging and ticking at oh dark thirty. The one thing I'm considering is going down 1 F over night — or half a degree, if that's a thing — just to time it so the heat is on when I get up. I love it on a cold morning when the bathroom radiator is hot, not least because my towel is on it :)

» If you want this just for monitoring thats about the only good use case.

Yeah… that. I'll look into z-wave, thanks. Maybe I'll stay primitive, though. We don't travel a lot in winter.

@ethicalpaul

» Why do you think the size of the main has something to do with how much faster one radiator heats than another one?

Because the main has to get hot all the way around before the upstairs bedroom radiator gets any steam. Like I said, it's 80 ft of main, and 60 ft betweent he first and the last radiator. That's a lot of iron to heat, with a relatively small boiler.

I'm not worried about waiting an extra 8 minutes, I'm thinking of the 34 kW (equivalent; I don't really do BTU) input power that's running an extra eight minutes just to get the first temperature increase in that radiator. It takes a long time to get the main up to temperature and for the main vents to stop puffing.

» what matters is how comfortable a room is.

That is certainly correct and has been fine, but it hasn't been cold for any length of time yet. So I'm just watching and slowly modifying the venting — which appears to have been pretty well balanced already, though with ancient and painted-over vents — so that I'm ready to address any deficiencies when it gets really cold.

Regarding insulating the main, which I plan to do shortly:
» it won’t help them heat much faster but it will help them hold heat longer between cycles

Any heat that doesn't radiate into the basement is heat I don't have to pump in to get the steam to transport.

» Then why stop at 2? Why not 5? Or 10? 🙂

Who says I'm stopping? 😎

It's two because @Steamhead said so, and when we have a weekend with cold and steady days, I'm going to time it with two vents and then with one of them blocked — which is easy to do with the MoM. I really like those things. And obsessing over this stuff seems like a harmless hobby. Wait until the end of the heating period when I downfire to a 63-03L :)

cheers -m

» But the main has to get hot all the way around before ANY radiator gets any steam (ideally)

I agree with the "ideally" — the best way to run the system would be to heat the main first and then the radiators, all at once.

But in my system, the first radiator in the loop takes steam almost ten minutes before the last one. It also gets hot long before the end of the main gets any wamrth. The system works well in practice, as the radiator closest to the thermostat is one of the last ones to get hot, so we're not shutting off prematurely. But the burner always runs at least 25 minutes. If we did this electrically, it'd be 15 kWh.

I'm pretty sure, and I will time it when I get the chance, that with the main insulated and an outside temperature of zero degrees, the main will have much less time to cool between cycles, will therefore heat up much quicker, and the heating will be much more even from one radiator to the other.

What I'm having trouble with in my head is how this affects efficiency.

My thinking is that the boiler and the main always get to the same state during a heat cycle. That's kind of obvious, and it takes a lot of energy. And on a warm day, the radiators heat only a little ways across before the thermostat registers the increase in temperature and shuts off — or they heat more evenly, and much longer, if it's super cold outside. So on a cold day, a larger fraction of the energy used goes to the radiators, where we want it, rather than the system stuff in the basement, where it's a necessarcy load that does not heat the house well.

If we assume all that heat in the basement drifts upstairs and heats the house, it makes no difference. If we assume that the basement heat is lost, then we have lousy efficiency when it's 50 F outside. It's probably somewhere in between, and I believe a steam system works most efficiently when it's really cold.

» they are "stealing" steam from the main.

Exactly.

» This is an indication that some of your radiators have too much venting

Untrue because

» a #4 is not too fast , ever

and that's what I got on all the downstairs radiators — not counting the ones I disconnected.
That is why I want to go even slower, which will be technically challenging.

» [..] radiators have too much venting or your main doesn't have enough

Doubtful because my boiler can only make steam so fast, and the gas gets "eaten up" by turning back into liquid as it goes along the main. But I will test by plugging one of my two main vents to see if it even has an effect.

» run your mini-split in heat mode when it's moderate out.

Installing one of those is on the list, to make summers more pleasant. So far it's been OK with two window ACs but it's not great for sleeping when it's muggy.

Learned Friends:

So I'm a little mad. After calling Oswald Supply — who sold me the Peerless near-boiler piping kit, great job — and describing the flue reducer piece I've misplaced, down to emailing a picture of said part, they sent me the wrong stuff. Only took nine days to get here, whereas the piping kit, all eighty lbs of it, took two. Go figure.

Y'all may remember that @EdTheHeaterMan graciously helped me out on page 1 of this thread, part number and everything.

So this is what showed up today, instead — the 6" to 5" vent reducer. I already have one of those installed, thank you. So this stuff is going back.

Time to get creative.
I'll still try to get the piece from the manufacturer, but meanwhile, I figured I'd make my own.

Are we not men? We are men.

With a pair of tin snips, some clamps, a bench vise, and a leftover piece of five inch vent pipe, I made this:

The height of the opening in the flue collector is 110 mm — who knew these guys were metric??? — and from the lone picture I took back in August, I counted pixels to get the height of the baffle piece.. which was 77 mm. Wanting a little safety margin, I aimed for 72 mm and mostly got it.

Since I didn't get started on this until I got home from work, I violated a basic tenet of experimentation and changed more than one parameter:

- I installed the flue reducer
and
- I blocked all radiator vents to concentrate the steam down the main.

In prior tests, the fastest I'd gotten heat to the end of the main had been ten minutes.

With the baffle installed, it was four minutes for warmth, and six minutes before the main got too hot to touch. At that time, the puffing noise from the main vents changed, so I'm guessing that's when the steam reached them.

Another before/after "measurement":
Since I don't have a thermometer for high temperatures, I used my hand and tried to rest it on the vent close to the chimney. I could maybe leave it on the pipe for five seconds before it got painfully hot.

With the homemade baffle installed, I can now place my hand on the same spot indefinitely. Clearly, there's less heat going up the chimney, which is a good thing.

I'm still planning to do more quantitative tests, but for now, I consider this progress.

Also, I would consider it a favor it @ethicalpaul would measure the height of the original baffle. Per the Peerless parts list, it's the same height for the 63-03 and 63-03L models.

cheers -m

Nah, you can touch it by reaching in from below, where the temperature/blocked-vent safety sensor is.

It's easy to reach but not easy to measure.
I took part of my vent piping off then it's right there.
No worries if you're not feeling it; I'm pretty confident I got the size right.

If you're so inclined — it might be easy to get a size with a piece of manila folder held against the top of the baffle, and a pencil mark made at the bottom.

cheers -m

Been reading some more, and searching using google's "site:heatinghelp.com insulation+shipping" which told me that the issue is the parcels are "oversized" per UPS. So that's why shipping is so expensive. I guess I'll carefully go over it again tomorrow and then bite the bullet.

I get that, Paul, but I meant in terms of risk, hazardous material, or whatever. I didn't think of size as a reason for high cost.

That should have occurred to me, I guess, having shipped bicycle frames before. That gets spendy in a hurry, too, and it's not from weight.

It's been a little over a week since the last skimming, and slowly the surging returned.

First the water level drops by an inch or so, then two …and today it was almost three inches gone mid-cycle.

I skimmed off a nearly full Home Depot bucket full of water, and now we're back to a one inch drop, or about a gallon.

I keep track of it; this was skimming #9. I would not have guessed it would take this long, or this many times.

cheers -m