in the boiler that the steam carried this additional water with it into the piping system. The solution to this problem turned out to be a boiler feed tank. This type of tank is much bigger than a standard condensate tank because its job is to act like a reservoir for the new boiler. It holds the water that originally was found in the old boiler. The other benefit to this style tank is that the pump on the receiver is controlled by a pump controller on the boiler, not a float switch in the receiver. The pump controller will only tell the pump to come on when the boiler actually needs water and then shut it off when it’s satisfied. All the condensate that is out in the system is drained back to the “reservoir” by gravity and waits until the pump controller turns the pump on. In each of the jobs I was called out to this heating season, once a feed tank and pump controller was added to the new boiler, all of the systems quieted down and performed as expected. If you have any questions or comments, e-mail me at gcarey@fiainc.com, call me at (800) 423-7187 or follow me on Twitter at @Ask_Gcarey. ICM The solution turned out to be a boiler feed tank. This type of tank is much bigger because its job is to act like a reservoir for the new boiler. Remember, although the boiler is new, you are still attaching it to a very old piping system. With less water to work with, the water level quickly approaches the low water cut-off level, which either turns the boiler off or sends a signal to the automatic feeder. Of course, the feeder does the only thing it can do: add gallons of water to the system. This allows the burner to continue making steam, but when the system finally shuts down, all the condensate works its way back to the boiler room. Once there, all that condensate goes back into the boiler and floods it. On the jobs that did not have an automatic feeder, the burner would shut off on low water and stay off until the condensate returned to the boiler. In the meantime, the house was uncomfortable because the boiler could never make enough steam to fill all the radiators before the low water cut-off turned the burner off. With the old boiler and all its water content, this was never an issue. Although the old boiler had an automatic feeder, it was never active. During a call for heat, the boiler never lost enough water to cause the feeder to operate. However, by simply replacing the old boiler with the new, “lower water content” boiler, the automatic feeder became very active. In fact, it fed water into the boiler on almost every heating cycle. Of course, after a few cycles, the water line was so high ICM/March/April 2015 23
ICM September-October 2014
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