Co-op in Brooklyn looking for steam consultant, 120 unit, single pipe, 1950s building

Contact @JohnNY

Thanks, Paul.

Those buildings to which local Law 97 applies have a real challenge. My Coop is exempt at around 20,000 sq ft. I would advise any Coop board that is in a situation similar to jgurin to take time and learn as much as you can about your building, steam heating systems and associated technologies as possible. Then make decide what you want to do according to your budget. Please note that the legislators make up these requirements but they exempt the City owned buildings. There is a lot of talk about using electric only. I can state from experience, we have real power grid issues in this City. Currently in Williamsburg my location, the voltage will drop from 117 in the morning to 108 without a load. This is before Con Ed issued reductions. Last week the voltage was so low after Con ed reductions my oil burner would not turn on. I had to change electrical connections to a line with a lower load.

how much gas is lost between the well and the burner on your furnace/boiler?

They are out of their minds. The grid is borderline as it is . More electrical load without improving the grid is just nuts.

From my experience when you get down around 108ish volts things stop working. Voltage is suppose to be within 10% of the equipment name plate. 120v which most things are rated at-10%=108

At my house, the standing voltage gets down to 100 during a heat wave, like we're experiencing now. The local grid just can't keep up.

for profit utilities aren't going to do anything to maintain their system unless someone makes them. there is significant investment required to fix the natural gas infrastructure too.

Well now. There is a reason for load shedding when the voltage (or frequency) sags, but it isn't to spike the customers. It's to protect the utility's generating and switchgear equipment — and to try and protect the entire grid from collapsing. I agree that having consumer equipment turn off or fail to start is rather a bore from the standpoint of the consumer. But may I humbly point out that having some major piece of generating equipment or switchgear fail (and yes, today that includes the oddly delicate equipment which allows wind and solar to connect) is a bit more inconvenient for lot more people… and a grid failure, such as the recent one in Spain (they're still trying to figure out exactly what did happen) which might necessitate a black start may take days to recover from.

Thank you Steamhead and MattMia. Appreciate the kind words. Mad Dog

Jamie, I did not say it was to spike the customer. I said it was not for you the customer. The main goal of the utilities is to protect their equipment. As for the situation in Spain, They and any person with a good understanding of power grids knows what happened. They just did not admit that they did not know what they were doing. Your power network cannot rely on a high percentage solar and or wind energy plants mixed in with coal, diesel or hydro turbines. If they do when there is a sudden drop of power because of cloud cover, wind velocity or load change, you will have chain reaction disconnects. Why, Because gas, oil powered and hydro powered systems have centrally located large turbines. Solar and wind systems do not. The massive size of the turbines spinning will have inertia and temporarily compensate for any sudden changes in the grid so they can be corrected by automated systems. Politics in Spain [the push for solar and wind power] led to their situation. How can you not know what happed days later, with an automated and fully monitored system?. Getting back on the subject, those of you who have local law 97 requirements should do all you can to optimize your steam systems and think twice before playing games with these heat pump alternatives. Heat pumps have compressors too and the reliability and cost of these systems must be determined. The price of electricity is also an issue. Coop managers and Directors: Do your home work

The latest on Spain which I've seen — and I've not seen a full engineering analysis of it — is that a large solar array dropped out, and there was a frequency instability as a result. That tripped a good bit of other generation off, and there wasn't enough spinning reserve to stabilise the system.

I'll wait a few months for the full analysis…

» let’s hopefully not base our opinion about the entire grid on one person’s reported voltage measured one day

Agreed.

Before this gets shut down for thread drift, let me pass this along: my cousin runs a large municipal power plant in the town of Mainz, Germany, that also provides hot water for heating… overall a highly efficient setup. From him I have the value of 60% efficiency for a modern gas turbine with 400 C at one end and liquid water at the other, just like we're using collapsing steam to pull heat into radiators — see, this is on-topic after all.

The German grid is more complex than the American one and it's networked with other countries… Germany just has more neighbors than the U.S. does, obviously. They are buying nuclear-generated electricity from France, which helps with stability. The grid is under huge stress, largely from having to splice in renewables and doing so preferentially, i.o.w. when the wind and solar rolls on, it MUST be put on the grid. Traditional power plants — mostly fossil-fuel based, nuclear got shut down after Fukushima — have to manage the stability of the grid while having reduced revenenue. I heard a talk by a retired engineer who showed a graph showing interventions necessary to keep the phase steady — he said, we used to have to do these once every few weeks.. now it's constant, dozens of times a day. Inasmuch as these are technical matters, they can be handled, but it requires investment to go along with new rules.

Transitioning to renewables is a wonderful and worthwhile project, but it works better when it's driven by engineering than politics, especially when the rules get crated by those trained in legal matters. It'd be a shame if wind & solar got a bad name because of poor implementation…remember what General Motors did to Diesel engines. Perception does become reality.

I'll stop now.

To All,

This is not an opinion based on one day. Yesterday my burner did not start again [6th time this summer]. I don't care about other power grids. As for New York City and my area, You can go on the local utilty's web site and look at the power outages and voltage reductions that they list. They are required by law to notify you in New York for reductions of 8 percent. My location in Williamsburg of the past 5 years has had an increase in high rise buildings and residential housing and associated loading . I had to call the company that services my steam boiler 3 times in the last heating season at a cost of $1,800 because of this problem and the damage caused. That is why I mentioned people in my situation install the AVR in their steam systems to prevent this. The shareholders in a Coop who spend $500,00 for their units do not want to hear about power grids or even local law 97 compliance. They want the problem solved, preventative measures taken and their maintenance cost foe their steam system kept low.

Induction motors with conventional controls will not shut down with an 8% voltage drop. They will draw more current and run hotter. Depending on the load and service factor they may trip out an overload and shut down after a while. It may shorten their life but 8% isn't going to make them shut down in most cases.

Fighting anecdote with anecdote, here in North Jersey it's 95F at 2pm and the voltage in my outlets is 121.9

The grid is fine, updated, and constantly being improved.