Learning from the 1930s

Great article! I grew up in a house and apartments in New Jersey and can remember the faint whistle of the radiator vents on our coal fired steam system. Can even remember early morning as kid feeding 2 shovels, shaking clinkers and cutting back damper on those frigid mornings. We now have a primary secondary hot water system with old CI radiators and love the heat. We have lived in GFA systems throughout life and nothing as comfortable as steam or hydronic heat! Nor as beautiful! Thanks for the sttories and education !

Thank you for bringing that to all of us Dan.''

Leon

I like seeing those Ol' copper fittings with the hole in the socket. Mad Dog

Surprised that nobody has opinions about my comment that »Concerning cost of steam compared to hot water; doesn't that depend on how many stories building is?«

On old two or three storey homes the boiler is located near chimney. So for HHW pipes can have one set of verticals and then runouts to radiators. For steam it's usually mains and multiple verticals. Which was cheaper? Recently saw a youtube with steam pipe running under floor. Was that a HHW converted to steam?

Hot water is cheaper to run than steam. smaller piping=less heat loss from the pipe. You don't have to boil the water which increases the efficiency. Steam you have to get to 212 degrees=more stack loss and boiler jacket loss and a larger PU factor. HW you can heat with a low water temp. Maybe as low as 120-130 if designed properly. Lower for radiant.

The lower the temp you run the less fuel you will use.

There is a large contingent that makes the assumption that a mod-con is superior to a fixed output boiler strictly due to the fact that it will condense at suitably low temperatures.

What is normally forgotten in this assumption is the "mod" part of the mod-con. Modulating the firing rate is also a serious variable that gives the mod-con significantly better efficiency.

The contingent compares the fixed output boiler at 85% efficiency to a mod-con that will condense at 93% efficiency. The different is 7%. However, every contractor who installs a mod-con and removes a fixed output boiler finds the increase in efficiency is a minimum of 20% and sometimes as much as 35%.

You either condemn every old boiler that is being replaced as having an efficiency of not more than 65% because nobody serviced it in 20 years or you must reflect on the fact that the improved efficiency of the mod-con has as much to do with the "mod" as it does with the "con".

i would assume the empire state building is 2 pipe and lots of areas got steam coils retrofitted for lots of reasons.

pretty sure it is district steam.

you aren't lifting the water in a hot water system, you are just overcoming the friction losses of the pipe and that energy doesn't evaporate, it is added to the water and pipe.

I removed a few of these when I gutted my bathrooms.

Heat pumps are probably all the proof you need that steam can technically be made extremely efficient. Perhaps heatpipes would be a closer example, but both use phase change. Add a wicking material like heat pipes into the system and you can even make condensate go uphill.

No, 120+ year old steam systems aren't, but a modern equivalent running in a vacuum @ 100-120F sure could be.