Graveyard of Heat-Timer Varivalves

I watched this video last night, it's very good. I wish these vents were better because the company is just up the road about 10 minutes from my house and I love a good local company.

But as it is, I agree with your assessment @patrykrebisz and I'm glad to now know the reason why they fail. I think this also explains why so many people complain of them "spitting". The condensate can't escape past the fallen ball and then gets blown out of the vent on the next call for heat.

So so many of my "clients" have these vents. I finally bought a couple to try but haven't put them into service yet.

Expensive vent valve, appears high quality when taken out of the packaging, sliding mechanism feels smooth and effortless………..and everyone I’ve used has failed after 2 years or less.

I’ve moved on to Maid o Mist and have had nothing but complete satisfaction from their operation and longevity.

They are basically a main vent for a radiator . Great for a building running on a Heat-timer..

I'm tempted to chuck one up in my lathe and cut the cylinder just enough to remove the top. They might be repairable some way and then resealed with high heat epoxy.

Update on my Maid Of Mist #5 replacement on my tiny bathroom radiator. It got the radiator very hot and successfully closed but not before letting an awful lot of "mist" escape onto my mirror during the burner cycle. I neve saw anywhere near that much escape from a Varivalve that was working properly.

It wasn't a failed vent because it did seal, although it took a while. There was no water in it initially because it was right out of the box. I used the word mist as a bit of a play on words. That amount of water loss per radiator per cycle is unacceptable imo. I should have take a picture of the water on the mirror. I'll check it again with water in the vent, so as to be fair.

Oh it was perfectly clear the way he stated it. This type of vent also has a lot of condensation inside of it and therefore is much more prone to water vapor escaping the vent. This is a decided advantage of the varivalves which close at their entry point rather than their exit point, in my opinion, when they are working. Too bad they may be practicing planned obsolescence.

You pay for what you get.

Gotta be a lapse of quality control. We'll never know what they did but they changed something.

Well does it count that they were the ones installed in all my radiators when I bought this house 21 years ago and I haven't had very many problems or failures and the ones I did were probably due to badly piped boiler and poorly pitched pipes and settled radiators which I rectified (the pipes and radiators at least)? Is that "data"? Only recently have I had two that I bought a year ago fail. One separated and rattles and that one prevented the radiator from getting steam and the other one leaked a small steady stream of steam. Their design doesn't have a float so of course if there is carryover into the radiators they can spit.

It is simply a poor design. I have heard of no evidence of any change in the manufacturing process or parts. As others have stated, these failures have gone on for years. There are things that you do not do in manufacturing when designing a component that is used in harsh [hot and corrosive] environments. [example: crimp vs soldering or welding.] Unfortunately, If you keep purchasing these vents and others with high failure rates, they keep selling them.

@Captain Who the Varivalve I bought less than 3 weeks ago failed shut yesterday. I mentioned this purchase on an earlier thread about Carryover/wet steam. The internal ball rattles. I contacted Heat Timer and they asked me to send it back to them.

I used these valves to vent my rads very fast and the pipes even faster with main vents such as the Big Mouths. I stopped buying them over 8 years ago due to high failure rate of the black colored ones. but I have one green top one from around 2012 that is working normally on my largest rad. Rob, their tech support guy told me the color coding along with the numbers signifies the manufacturing date. They have made no design or manufacturing process changes.

I did not ask him if they have any manufacturing QA/QC or even know if their design people were aware of the product failure rate for fear of antagonizing someone who merely works there, so I let my curiosity wither on the vine. Too often at the companies I worked in, product development engineers didn’t talk to manufacturing engineers. The latter were left to build products that were not designed for manufacturability. It would surprise me if this weren’t the case here.

So when they fail, do they fail in open or closed position?

Ball falls off, lands on hole, stuck closed, cold radiator?

I used to use Heat Timers, until I "discovered" the Gill and Pajek report. The eye opener is Varivalves, when fully shut still pass about a #5 venting rate. See their report here.

https://www.heatinghelp.com/systems-help-center/balancing-steam-systems-using-a-vent-capacity-chart/

For those that like charts, see this:

https://www.heatinghelp.com/systems-help-center/vent-valve-comparison/

I use Maid O' Mist almost completely, with one VentRite that the tenant won't let me replace.

For those that have seen this in the past, sorry for the perpetual monologue.