steam oil boiler

[BugsyPal]

There are steam or hot water "boilers" for heating that were installed when buildings went up some one hundred years ago, and still are going strong. Most have long been converted from coal to oil and or natural gas (some still do burn the first), but other than routine maintenance the things require nothing more and could in theory last another decade.


You can walk past many residential multifamily buildings here in Manhattan, NYC and peek into basements, there you'll find the original boilers still happily doing what they were meant to do. Many of these are "pre-war" buildings meaning they went up before WWI.


Boiler size:


Back in the day the "Dead Men" who designed, built and installed steam or hot water heating systems vastly oversized the things. This meant you had huge boilers versus the smaller replacements you see today.


Systems were oversized for several reasons. One, homes/buildings were vastly more "drafty" than today so heating systems had to be able to at least maintain 70F indoor temps when it could be (well) below freezing outdoors.


Next due to several influences (most notably the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 there came a theory illness could be prevented by proper indoor ventilation. This meant keeping windows open even in winter. By habit or even local legal statue heating systems had to be able to keep a certain indoor temp even with all those windows open.


The other interesting thing is that when coal was the fuel used it was mainly women/housewives who tended the boilers during the week. It was part of their housekeeping duties and many were quite good. However on the weekends His Nibbs took over and invariably the fire suffered because often he didn't know what he was doing and a smart wife learned to steer clear. So heating systems were all tolled oversized several times to deal with all these situations.


Fast forward to modern times buildings have become less drafty, better insulated and so forth all in aid of saving energy. Thus you don't need those huge boilers any longer as heating requirements have now


Boiler removal:


Often those huge old boilers are simply decommissioned but left where they are.


Usually boilers go into buildings soon as the foundations are finished, and often there just isn't any way to get those behemoths out again. The usual way is for the things to be cut up and taken out in bits and pieces. However this can cause nightmares if asbestos was used (and it often was) for any part of the boiler/system.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQB0KK2rxcw

[Coldjensens]

Originally Posted by chet everett

The key is really what type of heating system you have. In a "single pipe" system the relative energy loss that comes from each radiator makes the whole system much more prone to variations in temperature, In contrast a "two pipe" system (that really can have multiple pipes but each room has both a hot supply pipe and separate return to the heating unit...) tends to be much more uniform.

Thus the manufacturers will generally give a lifetime warranty for the systems based on hot water but will limit the warranty for systems based on a single steam filled pipe...

Two Pipe System

It is less common for a home built after WWII to have a two-pipe system based on steam instead of hot water, but if that is what you have there can be some special considerations to how such a system operates -- https://heatinghelp.com/systems-help...steam-heating/ The demands of having a system fully filled with steam puts more strain on the boiler and other components and modern lighter weight devices will not last like the old stuff...

Ours had a mix. Part was single pipe, part was 2 pipe. We had to replace all of the single pipe radiators in order to switch to hot water. The whole thing was expensive and a PIA. I wish I had looked at people from other states to find someone to put in a steam boiler and keep what we had.

Coalman the picture is simlar. However ours ad a maze of pipes attached to is all covered with asbestos insulation sleeves. It also had a big oil burner on the bottom and then a big tank to hold oil. overall it took up about 50% of the basement. It was a monster. Beautiful and scary at the same time.

[Coldjensens]

Originally Posted by thecoalman

You' not going to get 150 years out of modern boiler, if you get 30 or 40 years out if you are probably doing good.

Our modern "boiler' is more like a tankless hot water heater. You do not have a tank of water, you have a maze of pipes with flames that blast through them. The water heats as it passes through the pipes/flames. They use a special mix of water and chemicals to prevent corrosion or freezing in the even of a power failure. The new pipes are PEX, we stayed with vintage cast iron radiators, so the primary likely point of failure for the boiler is the stupid computer (which has been replaced twice). Luckily, it has a 20 year warranty I think.

The big advantage of it compared to the old one IMO is it takes up little more space than a big suitcase. It is supposedly way more efficient too, but in a 180 year old house, efficiency is hard to notice. The steam heat was much more pleasant than the hot water (which in turn is way more pleasant than forced air).