Gorton vents is there a way to test them?

Thanks for the info. I have both TSP and washing soda. Yes, that initial water was black as coal, hadn't seen water ever look like that. I suspect it's not clean yet, despite 4 skimmings. The manual mentions using a "recommended boil-out compound" to clean the boiler, but nowhere do they tell you what that mythical stuff is. I even called them, pretending to be a contractor, and they can't or won't provide that information. So why put that in the manual?

Perhaps not surprisingly these days, this Installation, Operating and Service manual doesn't tell you the fill capacity either. It only tells you the dimension of the normal fill line from the base of the unit. That's it. I just went through all the manuals, page by page, and there's no mention of water capacity! Maybe it is online, but I haven't tried that. I'll go do that now. Not available, that I can find. Weird. Make everyone reinvent the wheel when the factory obviously knows this…

Sorry about the pictures. Reused all the old piping, but I will be able to take pics in a week.

Thank you for the answer regarding the water capacity. What year manual are you quoting? I see it in the 2024 manual available online. Didn't see it in the 2021 manual that came with the boiler. Or I missed it! Those kinds of things can happen when you are frantic about your heating.

I'm going to say, that the Gorton #1 works, and seals, but it is making the marginal plumbing stand out like a sore thumb. The heating in the back of the house got worse. The radiators fill later, not sooner.

Somehow there's a lot of water (condensate) at that end. I could hear water in the radiator and steam ?gurgling through it, bubbling. (The boiler was on and in mid cycle.) Without the main vent, the amount of water was tiny. The right way to fix it is the tear out my walls and totally replace the work of the "plumber from hell" who is torturing me from 20 years ago. I can't afford this, and honestly, I'm going to be selling this house to move closer to my kids, so I really don't want to sink a lot of funds into this.

The boiler cycled on LWCO. I don't know why it does that, maybe that's due to residual oil in the boiler. When the water returns, the boiler is 2/3 full in the sight glass. During the first cycle, the upstairs radiators fed by the vented main were cold, and I could hear water sloshing in the pipes. Then the water drained back. The second cycle, the radiators heated, but I also heard water, but I guess, not as much.

I think I will remove the #1, because the heating behaves better. Not optimal, but the heat arrives sooner without the main vent. I know there's a problem inside the walls, likely a badly pitched horizontal section, but I would have to pull a toilet and a radiator to get any access. That denies me use of my bathroom for an extended period of time. And I'm not sure I can fix the problem easily. The access is poor, there's a chimney coming up, which takes up room that could have used to fix the problem.

Kind of perplexed really.

Don't know if I should return these Gortons and get MoM's. That would let me reuse the orifices I made which work in my house. I would have to drill out (modify) my Gortons to balance my home. Obviously, I'd check them first to see if they even work before modifying them. If I use the MoM's I could return the #1.

Confused as to whether I should return the #1. Dogma says use the vent. Empirical evidence is to the contrary. No matter what the reason was, I got less fill in the radiators using the #1, and the heat onset was late. That's like having undersized radiators, and the rooms are colder. Not good.

Color me confused. What would you do?

@ethicalpaul I asked this earlier, but are your MoM vents from Supply House, free from strong chemical smells? You didn't directly answer me. And sorry for this personal question, do you have a reasonable sense of smell? Some folks don't.

Thanks. That's helpful.

Can you provide any insight on my "procedure"? I'm not so young anymore, so I'd like to do the cleaning in an efficient manner.

Thanks, that makes things clearer. I'll see if I can scare up a transfer pump, that would make things a lot easier for me.

That's much better! Would make my life a lot easier.

I had to delay this a few days with the cold snap that arrived. Didn't want to let the house temp drop that fast. Tomorrow ought to be better temperature wise. Had to get another hose along with a pump. Shouldn't be too hard to do, he hopes.

The Gorton #1 is behaving itself, much better than the Hoffman vent's I had previously tried. At least it is sealing! The Hoffman's never did seal. If I can finally fix this oily boiler, maybe things can get back to normal again. Strangely, the first couple of heating cycles with the #1 were troubling. Some spitting and lots of water being pushed to the second floor But after a day or two, even though there's still a little water in the pipes, from a cold start, it's much better. The Gorton is venting like crazy when it needs to, and seals when it has to. Big win for the Gorton main vent.

Ok, today was warmer, and I drained the green water out until the drain was dripping. Dissolved 3 oz of TSP in about 1/2 gallon of hot water and poured it in the skim port. Then slowly refilled the boiler water. Finally fired it up. It's not good yet, but the water does move less, about 1/2 as much . I "lost" about 3" during the firing, at first it wasn't moving hardly at all. Bounce was plus minus 1/4", but would occasionally drop. Didn't hear much evidence of water in the lines, which is good. No banging or clanking. I need to do the actual skimming now.

Have to really watch it with near boiling water and plastic buckets. These buckets really aren't made for it. The bucket got a wee bit distorted. I'm only carrying a few gallons at a time, because I think the bucket will fail with more weight.

Thanks for your reply. I went out of my way to make sure nothing changed but the boiler, including all the near boiler stuff. What did change was the boiler and it's sensors, including the pressure trol. Not the header, nor the Hartford loop, or even the indirect HW heater loop.

I just finished skimming the boiler, for the 4th time (in it's existence at my residence). This time I followed @ethicalpaul 's suggestions, using 3 oz of TSP. The water is cleaner. The water surges less, and the water drops less on a full heat cycle. But it does drop some. Apparently enough to trip the CG400 LWCO intermediate sensor. I saw that, because I watched the whole cycle watching the boiler. I don't know how it does that, because the sight glass did not seem to be that low.

While I was finishing up the skimming, I added my old 0-3psi pressure gauge to the boiler, on a tee fitting. I don't know if I have a small leak or not, but the pressure during the full cycle never exceeded 0.2 psi. It heated the house fine, although it took a while due to the fact I had turned off the heat for 3 hours while doing the skimming. It was quiet, there was no hissing, no noise, save for pipes occasionally expanding. So the pressuretrol didn't seem to be involved at all. Before you ask, no it's not been calibrated by me. I did see it cycle (I think) but since there was no decent pressure gauge installed at that time, I don't know what it really cycled on. Now that I have a good gauge on it, it's quite instructive. You can even see the boiler go into vacuum when it shuts off and the vents are closed. It stays in vacuum a while, so I guess my handiwork isn't leaking that bad.

Oh, here's some pictures of the boiler and stuff near by.

While I was firing this boiler, the sight glass started leaking at the bottom gasket. The brass fitting that compresses the gasket was loose. So I tightened it. Then I noticed the bottom brass fitting was installed crooked (not vertical). I'll have to fix that since that will annoy me forever. It also makes for an asymmetrical seal on the glass tube. There's really no excuse for that, in my opinion. If you look at the first picture, you will see it needs a few more degrees of tightening.

Thanks for the critique. I probably have another pigtail in my stash of plumbing junk, I'll check and install it.

When skimming, I rotate the vertical pipe to about 15 degrees, so it comes out in a well defined pencil like stream. When vertical it was all over the place. With the angle it makes a stream, and more importantly, it clears the bucket!🙂

The LWCO has two LEDs on the side. One is labeled LWCO, the other is "Intermediate level cut off". I presume the LWCO is like bone dry low water sensor. That used to turn on before I did today's skimming. That's when the water disappeared from the sight glass. After flushing out the green stuff, and doing the TSP skim, the water goes to midway in the sight glass, and not to the bottom.

The intermediate level cut off is triggering when the water line is below 3/4" above the center of sensor port hole in the boiler. When that LED turns on, the boiler gas is cut and the boiler is disabled. A minute later, the LED goes off, and maybe 15 seconds later, the boiler fires again.

I suppose all this is still indicating that more skimming is needed. Still don't see any oil or anything like that, but it's behaving as if there's still something in there that's affecting the boil quality.