Objects found in heating systems
I was helping a contractor troubleshoot a heating problem that he was having with a residential boiler. The problem was in this one zone that would heat some days, but not heat on other days. You could feel the place where the hot water stopped flowing. It was right at this copper elbow. Heat some days; no heat other days.
Comments
-
Well,…… About the nickel obstruction? That nickel wasn't "LOST"
I need to keep this short, and I'm not here to cast any aspersions.
First of all I'm 60 years old and have found several. Always in a three-quarter inch, copper hydronic heating circuit. the nickel fits perfectly, try it.
A very old, experienced, trustworthy plumber told me over 20 years ago, (after telling him my discovery) that in fact plumbers (in some instances) deliberately placed a nickel in a strategic location, on jobs where they started having feelings, that they were going to have trouble getting paid.
It was also suggested, that it was to generate call backs. I'd like to think not, but I'll let the readers here be the judge.
0 -
I dropped a flux brush inside a 75 Gallon water heater. Try getting THAT out!!!!! Thank God...never became an issue. I've since replaced it. Mad Dog
0 -
Thanks so much for these great stories. You keep America warm. Lives well lived. I am learning from all of you! Thanks.
1 -
Thanks. Years ago, I met a chimney guy who, after not getting paid after the job was done, started to install a piece of plate glass halfway up the chimney. If he didn’t get paid, he left it there. The boiler guy installthe new boiler. The chimney, of course, wouldn’t draft. The homeowner would call him demanding that he return. He would insist on getting paid first, which every homeowner did. He’d then go back to the job, climb up on the roof and drop a brick down the chimney.
Retired and loving it.
4 -
-
I mean they only cost like a dollar 😀
2 -
I wasn't worried about the $1 flux brush....The endless call backs.."Why is our Hot Water so rusty?????" Mad Dog
0 -
For me it was working in office spaces with lift out ceiling panels. You pop a tile measure something or do some work move the ladder do some work move the ladder etc. etc.
At the end of the day you pop all the panels back in, then you find out you missing half your tools that are in the ceiling and don't know where they are.
but i found some good stuff others left behind as well.
1 -
i hate work like that in suspended ceilings where you go 4 ft then have to go up another 4' away. I don't mind pulling stuff in conduit(as long as someone didn't put the pull box where you need to disassemble the grid to get a ladder up to it), but i hate working stuff along a couple feet at a time up and down the ladder.
0 -
Turbulator in my old vertical tube New Yorker boiler disappeared. My guess is that it very slowly slid down the tube and got burned up in the cone of flame.
I've got no other explanation.
0 -
Somewhere I've heard that story before. Did you tell this online in the past? Maybe in one of your books?
0 -
I occasionally told it in my seminars, Phil. It would just pop up. It always made me laugh.
Retired and loving it.2 -
We had a semi hermetic refrigeration compressor go bad. It had been replaced the year before but the motor in the replacement had grounded out after a year. We pulled the end bell off the compressor to look at the motor and found out a cold chisel had been left inside the motor housing.
Needless to say we stopped buying rebuilt compressors from that company
0 -
Funny. When I was a fresh apprentice in 2007, I lost a Leatherman somewhere on a school job. 15 years and 5 companies later, I ended up in that same building (oddly enough, 85 miles from home) to relocate some baseboard element for some window replacements. I told my partner for the day that "If you see a Leatherman Rebar anywhere, I lost one here 15 years ago!", obviously joking because that thing was long gone. 2 days later he's up in a ceiling tile isolating the BB zone that we were about to demo, and he starts laughing his head off. Crawls down the ladder and says "is this yours?" Dude had a rusty and dusty Leatherman Rebar in his hand that was laying on top of the ceiling tile, with the flat screwdriver pulled out. The same flat screwdriver I used to vent all of the control assemblies 15 years earlier.
0 -
Best thing I ever found was a Greenlee ratcheting cable cutter the electrician on the job had left it behind in the ceiling. He had been giving me a hard time all the way through the job and couldn't make the DDC control system they installed work. He was a sub for us and I was running the whole 1,000,000 job.
This was back in the mid 90s when I knew nothing about DDC or computers. They spent a week trying to make this job work and it wouldn't work right. They had him his installers and the controls tech from Honeywell and a programmer and couldn't fix it. All huddled around the computer.
One day I was sitting with the head of maintenance, and he knew how to run the DDC we were looking at the graphics on the computer and he mentioned the sensor temps didn't seem right.
These AHUs had outside air , return air steam preheat, steam reheat chilled water and humidification.
I told him "Open the OA damper wide and shut off the steam reheat, preheat, chilled water and humidification' I said all the sensors should read the same temp which should match the OA temp.
They didn't the Mixed air sensor was way off.
I went across the street to the ahu and they had a MA sensor with a 6" sensor in a huge AHU.
I had to fight with the electrician to come back and install averaging sensors in all 5 AHUs. That fixed the job.
He had already left the job when I found his cutters so he didn't get them back and I figured I earned them he was an A—. Caused me a lot of issues.
At that time the cutters were worth $150 new now I think they are like $400
1 -
If you work on cars for any length of time… you either have or will lose a half inch or 10 mm socket somewhere in there…
Br. Jamie, osb
Building superintendent/caretaker, 7200 sq. ft. historic house museum with dependencies in New England
3 -
object found in a heating system sits on my desk.
have a great weekend
0 -
I left my leatherman in the top of an oil fired water heater, under the collector hood. I was racing trying to get cleaned up as my plane was waiting on me, and couldn't figure out where it was. I only realized where I had used it last after I got back home, and I never made it back to that job. That was a good leatherman and sorely missed.
I also had a boiler that had a drafting problem, and when I pulled the exhaust off the back, it was packed with ash, and a very large desiccated bird. There was not a cap on the chimney, so I guess it had sat up on top and somehow fell in . Maybe overcome by exhaust fumes?
Was also cleaning out a beckett burner one time and found a dead bat in the inside of the squirrel cage. Still not sure how it got in there as the air holes on the air band are set very small.
Rick
0 -
Rick - wow, hard to imagine scheduling service calls that include flights to location. Did you schedule multiple calls at same location?
0 -
There were two main villages i worked in that were across the bay and about a 20 minute flight. I charged travel time, so I would try to get a few calls lines up for tuneups, but emergencies trumped that. The planes were just commuter planes, think five passengers max if they dumped a seat, so it wasn't like holding up a regular airline. The plots were usually pretty accommodating about waiting.
Rick
1 -
I have had a couple of good finds over the years, but none as good as the one I caused for the service manager of the family retail fuel business when I was very young. Maybe when I was just 4 or 5 years old. I shared it a few years back here:
Edward Young Retired
After you make that expensive repair and you still have the same problem, What will you check next?
0 -
aren't you considerably older than space pac?
1 -
DOB = 1955. Will be 70 in December. Jet Heet was introduced in NJ in 1946, and sometime after that a cooling component was added to the small duct system called Jet Cool. In the 1950s that company was sold to Space Conditioning out of Virginia and they changed the name of the product to SpacePak. By the early 1960 My grandmother had one of the first central air conditioners in the neighborhood.
So I'm old, but SpackPak is just a little older. I was in first grade in 1961.
Edward Young Retired
After you make that expensive repair and you still have the same problem, What will you check next?
2 -
Oh. I thought space pak was a late 70's/early 80's old houses weren't something to throw out anymore thing.
0 -
Their web site kind of seemed to obscure that they had to come in to existence at some point from the multiple takeovers by corporate overlords.
0
Categories
- All Categories
- 87.1K THE MAIN WALL
- 3.2K A-C, Heat Pumps & Refrigeration
- 58 Biomass
- 427 Carbon Monoxide Awareness
- 114 Chimneys & Flues
- 2.1K Domestic Hot Water
- 5.7K Gas Heating
- 110 Geothermal
- 161 Indoor-Air Quality
- 3.6K Oil Heating
- 71 Pipe Deterioration
- 999 Plumbing
- 6.3K Radiant Heating
- 392 Solar
- 15.4K Strictly Steam
- 3.4K Thermostats and Controls
- 55 Water Quality
- 46 Industry Classes
- 49 Job Opportunities
- 18 Recall Announcements