Steam piping, change in elevation solution.
Once in a great while, among the insanity of running a business and dealing with the whole getting old thing, there are still times I find I'm actually proud of myself. So, here I am today. This worked out better than I could've anticipated.
We had a situation where a steam main was moved to accommodate the addition of some storage lockers in a Brooklyn multi-family basement. No one in the building remembers when the work was done but the current residents all said the heating system had "always made a ton of noise" during the heating season, especially on colder days when the system ran longer cycles. Half the main had been moved and back-pitched so there was good original parallel flow in one part of the building and then counterflow in the other. Both sides shared a return that was rendered undersized by the old piping alterations.
It's difficult to photograph but here was my solution. The left side comes from the boiler and the right side is a back-pitched main serving about half the building. There is no practical way to move the right side main, or at least, moving it would incur tremendous costs.
It now works silently and heat distribution is normalized.
Consulting & Troubleshooting
Heating in NYC or NJ.
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Comments
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it really isn't that hard if yo think like steam. you need to keep the steam from going where it shouldn't and give the condensate somewhere to go.
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the drips and wet return are all new, right?
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nice!
Br. Jamie, osb
Building superintendent/caretaker, 7200 sq. ft. historic house museum with dependencies in New England0 -
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i would also like to know. i suspect some of it has to do with what was already there.
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That's the ticket!!!
I might have done it different but what do I know?
I probably would have teed up from the boiler main and up from the counterflow main and tied that together for the steam. Then dripped both mains the same way you did connecting them below the water line. That way the steam isn't fighting the condensate in the short riser.
But all that doesn't matter you fixed it and it works!!!
Something so simple with a few pieces of pipe that nothing can go wrong with.
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