Steam Heat

[PRR]

> Steam radiator is common in your country ?

No longer. I have had two steam-heated houses. Both were One-Pipe systems so not easily converted to Hot Water. Steam Heat was a Big Thing for almost 100 years but faded mid-century. Both my houses' steam installations looked like 1930s-1940s.

> 24 years working at wholesale of hydraulic, sanitary and heating equipment and never hear about steam radiators in civil houses

In 1990 we had a few steam-heat "specialties" readily available in older hardware stores. Oddly the Air-Valves, which give the most trouble, were not easy to get in stores. They were still being made 30 miles away and I ordered a whole box. We got a few extra radiators by driving around town, people were ripping-out steam systems. The original coal boiler had been replaced with an oil boiler, which we converted to gas (on a cold weekend when the oil ran out).

[kagliostro]

That is interesting to know for me

--

... were One-Pipe systems so not easily converted to Hot Water

Here is common from many years to have water heated radiators using single pipe system, not particularly loved, but can be found in many homes

this is a single-pipe valve


This is a water heating system, single pipe



--


My favorite system uses coplanar collectors







Franco

p.s.: I apologize for the OT

[PRR]

Here is a good picture.  520kB PDF It depends on steam being "thin", so the condensed water can flow back the same pipe. It needs big pipes, or the water blocks the steam and it bangs. Both my houses had pipes which were extremely over-size for the load, to avoid any complaints. The drawback is very high heat-loss in the cellar and long start-up time to get all that heavy iron to the boiling point so steam would rise to the radiators.

"Good" home steam heat, and most commercial buildings, used 2-pipe steam. But one of my homes was a farm-house and money may have been tight. (There was also a gravity hot-air system before that.) The other was built just after WWII, as inexpensively as possible.

Water will not get out of its own way, so you need two pipes. That "single-pipe valve" is clever but still needs two pipes through the floor and in the walls. In an old house, this is awkward. Now we have plastic pipes suitable for hot water and it would not be impossible. However once I had all the air-vents working, steam heat was good heat. There are people who love it. https://forum.heatinghelp.com/categories/strictly-steam

[kagliostro]

Many Thanks PRR

I really appreciate your info, this kind of house heater is new to me

--

Here we had something similar in ancient buildings, it was a heating sistem using water based on natural convenction, so it used very large pipes and no pump



In some way similar to the steam sistem, but it requires two pipes instead of one

Franco

[shooter]

out here in the sticks a lot of folk use boiler based wood heaters.  the modern design usually has pex tubing installed as floor heat, some splice it into existing duckwork for "multiple" heat source operation.  I helped scrap out a business with the radiator type, steel pipe operation you're talking, was NOT worth the return on investment 

[kagliostro]

Ciao Shooter

What about your latest paintings ?

Franco

[shooter]

the weather here is like Italia in the spring 
my brain has 2 halves, it's thinking from the wrong side to paint, if that makes sense 

[Ritchie200]

Floor heat is good and bad. It’s a nice big chunk of thermal mass but regardless of “reflector” or “insulator” materials used underneath, there are still huge losses to the soil if on grade. I’ve also found more than one damaged copper or pex line with my thermal camera. That is a lot of concrete to chip for a leak repair. However if you have a teenage son or daughter and cutting/chopping/splitting wood is a character building exercise in your mind, wood fired boilers are a great investment!


Jim

[shooter]

I burned wood for 25yrs, fun is a relative thing 
and the kids, they just laughed, Dad, it's not the great depression, you can afford to buy wood   

my buddy has a 40X40 "truck-lift" garage with pex in the cement, great in January, July chipping concrete to fix a leak, not so much

[OrganicEffects]

We’ve got hot water radiators and an oil boiler. All I know about it is the cats love laying on it in the winter time. Looks uncomfortable as hell. Assuming the oil boiler isn’t from 1930, but I’m sure the radiators are.

[kagliostro]

Splitting wood exercises 

https://youtu.be/MImyKKoS06c

and if you are lazy


https://youtu.be/IcirMxYtAO8

Franco

[shooter]

the 'ol timers told me wood heat was the best because it burned 5 times
cut the tree
load the tree
unload the trees
split the tree
heat your house
 

[sluckey]

We have free steam heat here in LA. 95°F and 90% humidity. 

[PRR]

> folk use boiler based wood heaters.

But liquid water, right?

(After hearing with real steam, I'm bothered by calling a water heater a boiler.)

[shooter]

yes, everyone calls 'em boilers, IIRC they run on "radiator fluid"

[silverfox]

> folk use boiler based wood heaters.

But liquid water, right?

(After hearing with real steam, I'm bothered by calling a water heater a boiler.)

Water, our bodies are 70+ % water. Water is the most efficient store of heat. The phase transitions have flat lines indicating there is no increase in temperature until x amount of energy is put into the existing phase. It's nonlinear. The greatest investment of energy occurs between the liquid, gas, steam phase. This was the beauty of the steam locomotives. All kinds of cool stuff with steam. Superheated steam drove industry, and still does to a degree, drove industry since the late 1800's.


Worked with an old GE steam turbine in a lumber mill. Mechanical governor and all. Very reliable.


silverfox.

[PRR]

> water based on natural convenction, so it used very large pipes and no pump

Also done here.
http://gluedideas.com/content-collection/Radfords-cyclopedia-of-construction-Vol-9-Heating-Systems-Plumbing/images/Hot-Water-Heating4.jpg
http://gluedideas.com/content-collection/Radfords-cyclopedia-of-construction-Vol-9-Heating-Systems-Plumbing/Hot-Water-Heating_P1.html
http://gluedideas.com/content-collection/Radfords-cyclopedia-of-construction-Vol-9-Heating-Systems-Plumbing/Hot-Water-Heating_P2.html
From Radford's Cyclopedia of Construction by William A. Radford (1909)

Apparently yours and this are "overhead", the main runs up to the roof then comes down to the radiators. There is also a system where the mains only go to the radiators without the overhead loop. Yes, big pipes, but the real limit is how much heat can be moved to the air in the rooms.

Adding a pump allows smaller pipes but does not significantly reduce the size of the radiators. (Unless you also add a fan on each radiator. This is THE common system now for offices and schools and every motel I've seen.)

[kagliostro]

(Unless you also add a fan on each radiator. This is THE common system now for offices and schools and every motel I've seen.)

also here many office use that kind of radiator (we call it aerotermo), the defect is that the fan move a lot of powder, so you must use filters and clean it frequently

the real limit is how much heat can be moved to the air in the rooms

That depends on the surface of the radiator (and the fluid temperature)

Franco

[PRR]

> fan move a lot of powder, ...filters

"dust".

Yes, this is true of about any system which improves heat flow with a fan-- it picks up dust. I put a very large filter on my new furnace. (My old furnace took very thin filters and the former owner had stocked-up on $0.99 filters which didn't do much.)
https://customer.resideo.com/resources/Techlit/TechLitDocuments/50-0000s/50-9091.pdf
I also have a pre-filter in the air return grill. (Partly to catch dust, but also to catch dog-treats which land on the floor grill.)

[Ritchie200]

It's interesting to talk with the OLD HVAC guys, the ones who used to form and fabricate the ductwork with flowing splits, beautiful radiuses, and a damper on every supply.  They swear up and down that the old woven filters (that you can read a newspaper through) are the ONLY type you should be using - as airflow is EVERYTHING!  Dust?  That's what a vacuum and dust rag are for!  Nowadays you have a trunk line and usually 90 degree runs off of that.  No craftsmanship involved and 3M is making more money selling furnace filters than tape.  The new HVAC guys are all about filter, filter, filter.  Who is right?   The new systems have figured out the best fan speed for the unit's rated CFM to keep the hot air hot as long as efficiently possible and then cranks it up for the AC - something that was not available back in the day.  It sure is amazing to see the craftsmanship of the old ductwork tho!

I also have the big pleated filter like PRR.  That thing will flow a lot of air as the filter area is huge.  Popped in a UV light to kill the cooties and a fresh air exchanger for the stuffy days of winter - works fantastic!  (Also installed the furnace and AC myself and fabricated new transitions - bought everything at cost from these guys, great prices, awesome company, fantastic support, super instructional DVD:  https://www.alpinehomeair.com  )  It looks really good and even a might better than perfessional if I do say so myself because of how anal I am.  However, if I had hired a guy and he had spent as much time as I did on it, I would have to work a few more years before I could retire just to pay for it...  But if a amateur hack like me could do it, anybody can.

Jim

[Ritchie200]

Silverfox,

Your avatar wouldn't have anything to do with your steam fascination, would it? 

Jim

[PRR]

> That thing will flow a lot of air as the filter area is huge.

It flows so well that I can hardly get a pressure-drop reading across it. Together with a new and generous return duct (the old return made the old furnace wheeze and overheat), the new furnace moves a lot of air with ease. And the big filter didn't need replacing for 3 years. (I let it go 4, then it was too gross to look at.)

A downside of the short generous return and large filter is the return grill is somewhat loud. That's another reason I stuffed a bulk-filter in it, to damp the sound.

The flip-side of plenty of air is it never feels hot at the register, and is "drafty" for a minute at start-up. I know the low temperature is good efficiency. Also the smoke-pipe hardly gets warm. (The old furnace flue would sear your flesh-- I'm now getting ALL the heat out of the fuel.)

[kagliostro]

So you are saying that now your house has an hot air heater system ?

Franco

[Ritchie200]

> That thing will flow a lot of air as the filter area is huge.

The flip-side of plenty of air is it never feels hot at the register, and is "drafty" for a minute at start-up. I know the low temperature is good efficiency. Also the smoke-pipe hardly gets warm. (The old furnace flue would sear your flesh-- I'm now getting ALL the heat out of the fuel.)

Have your HVAC guy (or you) install a two speed or multi speed fan.  Slow that puppy down for the heat.  You are loosing Btu's moving it that fast.

Kagliostro, yes he has forced air heat now.

Jim

[shooter]

two speed or multi speed fan

I built a LM339 based fan controller, worked well for varying fan - verses temp, functionality no perceptible AHH moments

[PRR]

> now your house has an hot air heater system ?

Yes. This is the most common type in the US. It is cheap. It supports air-conditioning. Also it is cheap.

There may have been a wood-stove on the main floor. I found an oil-fired hot-air furnace in the cellar. And there was probably a wood-stove in the cellar ducted to the same ducts. (If you could not afford oil this month, burn wood.) At least I found extra duct-holes where another furnace could have gone, and damage to the cellar window where they threw wood in.

I was told that right after he installed the oil/air system, he was offered a "hydronic" system cheap. This would be hot water in base-board enclosures. It is considered more deluxe than hot air. With the old heavy pipes it would hold heat longer than hot air. (However the house has good insulation for its thermal mass.) You can't really cool or dehumidify with baseboard radiators. However A/C was not common here in the 1980s.

The oil-furnace was too large for the ducts. (The wood-stove would have been hotter air so that was OK.) The fire-pot was cracked from backed-up heat. The smoke-pipe would grille a steak. Also I do not like oil in the cellar, and the tank was old so I *could* have 200 gallons of oil on the floor. After spending a winter estimating heat loss and researching local weather extremes, I got a 95% efficient propane hot-air furnace half the output (1/4 the size) and new return duct, and A/C. The first winter, one night, was colder than we expected, and the furnace was OK, just.

I think the fan in the 40kBTU/h furnace is the same as the fan in the 60kBTU/h furnace in the same series. Even running on Low (of 4 speeds) there is plenty of air. I believe a PSC motor will turn-down with small drop of voltage, and I got a Variac, but have not wired it in.

[shooter]

After spending a winter estimating heat loss and researching local weather extremes

My wife thought I was nuts doing the same thing 
had your same previous set-up, settled on the same 95%, but I sprang for the 80 or 90k BTU because it was a "mis-order" for a commercial customer

still got the fuel-oil tank in the basement 
the Dowagiac '40s oil furnace and add-on wood furnace got scraped

[PRR]

> I sprang for the 80 or 90k BTU

Over-sizing does not seem to have much effect on seasonal efficiency, at least with modern low-mass furnaces which don't even get that hot (low shut-down losses).

But any way I figured it, the existing ducts at high-efficiency furnace temperatures were NOT big enough to pass 80kBTU/h without roaring and blower-strain (as the old furnace was proving). And I needed 30+kBTU/h, and the hot ducts ducts would be fine at 40kBTU/h, and the return had to go in any case, so I got the 40.

[shooter]

Over-sizing does not seem to have much effect

The priced was right 

the oil burner was a 140kbtu at 60% efficiency, which for the '40s I thought reasonably efficient.  Plus the house add-on that we did doubled the square FT.
even with argon low E glass, new insulation, she still gets chilly, but I'm old, 60 degrees is chilly 

[PRR]

> the Dowagiac '40s oil furnace

Had to look that up. Before my time.

HowEVer, in a SciFi(!) collection, I just hit a 1952 story which starts with trouble in an oil burner. "Gravity feed", and I am glad I never saw one of those.
====================================
Lottie is as cute a little ex-waitress as ever flipped the suds off a glass of beer, but she just ain't mechanically minded. The day Uncle Alphonse died and left us $2500 and I went out and bought a kitchen and shed full of appliances for her, that was a sad day, all right. She has lived a fearful life ever since, too proud of her dishwasher and automatic this and that to consider selling them, but scared stiff of the noises they make and the vibrations and all the mysterious dials and lights, etc.

So this Friday afternoon when the oil-burner blew out from the high wind, she got terrified, sent the kids over to their grandmother's in a cab and sat for two hours trying to make up her mind whether to call the fire department or the plumber. Meanwhile, this blasted oil stove was overflowing into the fire pot. "Well, turn it off!" I yelled. "I'll be in right away!" I ducked into the garage and got a big handful of rags and a hunk of string and a short stick. This I have been through before. I went in and kissed her pretty white face, and a couple of worry lines disappeared. "Get me a pan or something," I said and started dismantling the front of the heater. These gravity-flow oil heaters weren't built to make it easy to drain off excess oil. There's a brass plug at the inlet, but no one in history has been able to stir one, the oil man told me. I weigh 200 pounds stripped, but all I ever did was ruin a tool trying.

The only way to get out the oil was to open the front, stuff rags down through the narrow fire slot, sop up the stuff and fish out the rags with the string tied around one end of the bundle. Then you wring out the rags with your bare hands into a pan. "Hey, Lottie," I yelled, "this is your roaster-pan! It'll be hard to clean out the oil smell!" But, of course, it was too late. I had squeezed a half-pint of oil into it already. So I went on dunking and wringing and thinking how lousy my cigarettes were going to taste all evening and feeling glad that I delivered beer instead of oil for a living.

I got the stove bailed out and lit with only one serious blast of soot out the "Light Here" hole. Then I dumped the oil out in the alley and set the roaster pan in the sink. Lottie was peeling potatoes for dinner, and she snuggled her yellow curls on my shoulder kind of apologetically for the mess she had caused me. I scrubbed the soot and oil off my hands and told her it was all right, only next time, for gosh sakes, please turn the stove off at least. The water I was splashing into the roaster gathered up in little shrinking drops and reminded me that the pig-hocks I brought home for Sunday dinner were going to rate throwing out unless we got the oil smell out of the pan.

"Tell you what you do," I said to Lottie. "Get me all your cleaning soaps and stuff and let's see what we got." Lottie is always trying out some new handy-dandy little kitchen helper compound, so she hefted up quite an armload. Now, when I was in high school, I really liked chemistry. "Charlie, Boy Scientist," my pals used to sneer at me. But I was pretty good at it, and I been reading the science magazines right along ever since. So I know what a detergent is supposed to do, and all about how soaps act, and stuff that most people take the advertisers' word for. "This one," I told Lottie, "has a lot of caustic in it, see?" She nodded and said that's the one that ruined her aluminum coffee pot. She remembered it specially. I poured some very hot tap water into the roaster and shook in the strong soap powder. "This is to saponify the oil," I explained. "What's saponify?" Lottie asked. "That means to make soap. Soap is mainly a mixture of some caustic with fat or oil. It makes sudsy soap." "But we got soap," she said. "Why don't you just use the soap we got?" We went into the business of soap-making pretty deep. Meanwhile, I read some more labels and added pinches of this and that detergent and a few squirts of liquid "wonder-cleaners" that didn't say what was in them.

In her crisp Scotch way, Lottie got across to me that she thought I was wasting soap powder and my time and cluttering up the sink while she was busy there.....
===================

That's as far as I got. And it ain't Science Fiction. I suppose he is going to keep mixing miracle cleaners and develop a better heating fuel, or Cold Fusion, or poison gas.

[kagliostro]

Nice story


Franco

[silverfox]

Silverfox,

Your avatar wouldn't have anything to do with your steam fascination, would it? 

Jim

In part. The internet id originally came about after moving to Southern Oregon and first viewing said Silver Foxes in the area. Seems at one time a fox farmer became a faux farmer and let go the Silver Foxes he was breeding. I see them here from time to time. Then during a search to resolve the various identities associated with the id, I came upon the locomotive named after such. Being an amateur enthusiast of thermodynamics and having some experience with power generation that finally cinched the Avatar.

[sluckey]

I thought it was a Charlie Rich thing.

[shooter]

Me too!

enthusiast of thermodynamics

as the poster child for ADD I love how all things tend to chaos