I'm glad it's ready to go for year 50! My Peerless bathroom heater usually has a yellow flame like that, the first fire up. Then it's nice, and blue the next time. Just fired it up for year 66 of service!
I'm miss hot water heat and the ability to easily control the heat in each room i grew up in Baltimore but moved to Texas where boiler heat is non-existent I have to explain what a boiler is to Texans That song came on just as you got me thinking about it
Around these parts there aren't any real valves on the radiators to adjust the flow of hot water. In other parts they have thermostatic control valves so you actually can turn the heat up or down in the room if need be.
That's the thing I like about boilers vs furnaces. They have a tendency to heat the whole house evenly whereas a furnace it depends how far from the furnace you are how much heat you get. In my old house it didn't matter much as it was so small there weren't any long runs so the whole house heated quickly. Here there are long runs which don't provide much heat vs short runs that will roast you out. My bedroom is fortunately or unfortunately the shortest run in the house so I get all the heat in the winter which is bad for sleeping unless I close up the damper on the vent to force the heat to continue to the next room, then during the summer I get all the AC so that's good for sleeping but causes the condenser to run a lot longer to cool the rest of the house so we play the same game with the damper. The good thing about furnaces is the heat is almost instantaneous. The burner comes on and runs for about 2 minutes before the fan comes on but once it does you get lots of warm air that heats the house quickly. Boiler heat is just natural convection which may take a little longer to warm up a room.
Yes, that reminds me of a time a few years ago, maybe more than a few. Wif and I went out on a cold winter's night to eat at a nearby Thai restaurant. We've eaten there many times before. We were seated, fortunately (and maybe deliberately) by a floor register for heat, and that thing was absolutely chooching! That was nice indeed because it was really cold out. I've also been to Sharkie's when the heat was on, and it's a furnace there too. The problem with both of those places is once it shuts off, the happiness is over until the thermostat calls for more. One time at Sharkie's we visited his brother, he was talking about his truck and how it has the automatic climate controls. This is the same system that's in my car so I could directly relate. He said "Once it reaches temperature, it goes cold! I want it to work like the manual controls, keep dumping the heat out until I turn it down. With the boiler, oh yeah it takes longer but it stays longer as well. I don't have it as good as even older homes that had cast iron radiators. Those take forevermore to get hot, but once they do, they stay hot for a while. With a ducted system with a blower, it's important to balance the system properly. My A/C system has dampers on the air handler for each run to each vent, since each one is a "home run" back to the air handler. They're hidden, I found them after reading about them and then indeed noticed they were there. I didn't know about them when I got those vent fans to blow more cold towards the dining room and kitchen. They did the trick entirely, so that solved that problem, but I'd have been wise to adjust those dampers to make sure those vents were full open and the rest were just partially closed. There are 2 vents in my office, early on, one of them was blowing way too much cold air. I found this magnetic thing that blocks off the vent, which I did very soon after moving in, not knowing about those dampers. Now it's a funny thing, now that you bring it up and we're on the topic. When you were last here, you had shut the vents in the guest bedroom upstairs, which I had noticed after you left. No problem with that and of course you are welcome to do so. But--that actually clued me in to something. A few years ago we started using that room regularly, but before that I had the vents in that room closed off. Now I'm finding the A/C upstairs to be "not as adequate as it used to be" for lack of a better term. Well yes, with a whole extra room to cool off, that makes sense. Your shutting the vents also clued me in to something else--that room, despite being the farthest run, happens to cool off more than my bedroom where the thermostat is. I'd prefer it to be balanced so everything cools evenly. With those vents closed it does get warmer in that room in the summer but it's not bad. That means I need to go into the attic and see if the air handler upstairs also has those dampers, which I will then adjust to limit the chooch to the guest room, redirecting more air elsewhere. So your shutting those vents because you grow vertically instead of horizontally was actually a very good thing, and I will need to address that come A/C season. Incidentally, balancing the system is a delicate act, and can take 24 to sometimes even 48 hours to feel a difference. Best to have thermometers in each room so you can read the temperature directly.
The key is also how well the ducts are insulated. Granted this was with A/C, but one time when Jay was here, we put the meat thermometer in the vents to see how cool the air was coming out. We tried both the vents closest and farthest from the air handler, and both were the same. The central air hydronic I had was a cool system, but I like having furnaces now. One is because each floor has its own one now, and there is no longer any worry about water leaks, air in the lines, low pressure, expansion tanks, things like that. On our old system, if one of the valves didn't work, no problem, the other floors would still get heat, or you could manually open it to have the heat still go to that floor. But if something like the pump or burners didn't work, then the entire house had no heat. And the latter had that happen twice I believe. Funny story though, one time in late 2004 or 2005, I got home from high school, I open the house door and immediately am hit with this like blast of heat. 1st floor heat was running, checked the thermostat, it was at 80. This was at the time before I knew as much as I do now about these things. I immediately shut off the thermostat.......no difference. I check the basement, sure enough the boiler and 1st floor air handler are still running. I'm completely at a loss and just had no clue what to do. Took me a couple of minutes until I remembered. We have an emergency switch at the top of the stairs! Hit that, boiler finally shut off, and eventually the air handler did as well. Turns out, what happened was, the 1st floor water valve was stuck open, and because of that, it mechanically thought it was still calling for heat even without the thermostat. The valve itself was fine, it was just its open/close device that was defective. But it was about 15 years old at the time, so I'd say it lasted. One thing I do miss though. On the 2nd floor, once the boiler was all heated up, when it called for heat and the valve opened, the cooled water in the air handler's heat exchanger would go through the piping, which would immediately cool down the pipes in the hallway floor, which would cause creaking,.......stop...and then creaking again as it was replaced by the heated water behind it, heating them up again. At the boiler itself, you could feel this in the piping too. The only problem was, if the 1st floor was going, this cooled water could also make its way into the heat exchanger for that, trip the hydrostat and cause the blower to shut off. But it would usually come back on in a couple of minutes or so.
@jaykay18 at my mom's childhood house that's no longer around it used to have a single furnace in the middle of the floor. That was all heat you got. No central heat.
@@Sharkie626 All of the runs here are insulated by default, that's the kind of ducts they used. That setup you had there was very interesting. Only one I have ever seen like that. Seems like quite a lot of equipment to achieve the same thing. It also seemed like the two systems didn't exactly "talk" to each other much either. It's kind of like the electric pressure cooker I have. The lid, which locks in place, does not talk to the electronics in the pot at all. One has no way of knowing what the other is doing. The lid locks mechanically, either based on the pressure of the steam or on the temperature, not sure which. The base has a sensor that can sense the temperature of the inner pot go above the boiling point. At that point, the only way that could happen is if the lid is on and has sealed and is building pressure, that would be the only way the temperature would go up. Then and only then, does the timer for the program set count down. And that all happens without one part talking to the other, not even through an interlock switch.
@@lexmarks567 That WAS central heat. It was centrally located. And yeah, many houses were heated that way back in the day. There's a place here called Bethpage Restoration Village, it's about American life in the olden days before 1900. I was forced to go there for my 4th grade field trip. They have replicated many of the same ways of life and you get to tour the different vintage building. They have people doing what they did back then, dressed the part, and they are knowledgeable and you can ask them questions. They had a big cast iron stove most times, they kept it stocked with wood or coal, and it was centrally located. You did everything nearing it. Needed to cook? You'd put a pot on top of it. Iron clothes? No electric irons, but they had ones made out of cast iron, you';d put those on and let them heat up and then you could iron. With the exception of any electronics, including the telephone, they did everything we do today, just in a more Flintstones kind of way. Occasionally in certain buildings you'll spot a faux pas, a wireless access point. They might have mandated smoke alarms too being that it's open to the public. I think central heating as we know it today was starting to catch on in the later 1800s. Some were even hydronic systems like mine but did not use circulator pumps because no electricity, they just allowed convection to take care of it. My dad's house was built in 1956 and he said when he moved in, in 79, it still had a coal chute. The boiler used to be coal fired. The coal delivery man would show up, fill a wheelbarrow full or however it was measured, go around to the backyard, and dump it down the coal chute. The homeowner would have to feed the boiler coal as needed. Sometime in the 60s to 70s, oil was "the next big thing" so the boiler was converted to oil. In 1990 my dad converted it to gas. If they keep on with this green energy BS, they'll stop selling gas and force everyone to go electric. When that one blows over I guess we'll have to revert back to a hamster in a hamster wheel.
Those old boilers usually last almost forever as long as you keep them running in their "comfort zone" (as in not too cold and not too hot) and do at least some sort of maintenance on the system. Newer systems aren't as well made as the old ones, mainly cause manufacturers usually cheap out and make important parts like the burn chamber heat exchanger out of aluminum to save costs. Luckily the boiler of my furnace is made out of stainless steel and only has minimal corrosion on it, so I hope it'll last a couple more years. I do expect the local government to be stupid and manually expire the natural gas distribution system way before the boiler here should have corroded through, but time will tell.
That's great to hear. I hope this keeps running for a long time. There's really not much to go wrong. As for expiring the natural gas, that's a pretty hard sell. There would be a lot of trouble if they attempted that. They keep pushing these electric cars, that never worked in the past and it's not going to work this time either. They'll be around in some form, but I think we're going to see a lot more hybrids on the road. You can also blame your car insurance rates going up and up and up on electric cars. Tesla gets a rock ding on the battery, the cost to repair is too high and the entire car is written off. That money's got to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is our pockets.
I did kick the air on a couple of times in Octember and early November, we were having a rather warm spell here. Those days are done, going to get cold now for the next month.
![Digital Circus Episode 4 [TRAILER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/abZtsmMUbJo/mqdefault.jpg)
I'm glad it's ready to go for year 50! My Peerless bathroom heater usually has a yellow flame like that, the first fire up. Then it's nice, and blue the next time. Just fired it up for year 66 of service!
Oh yeah, believe you me, we need it now! Been chooching 2 days now and all is well. Glad that Peerless fired up, I look forward to seeing that one!
I'm miss hot water heat and the ability to easily control the heat in each room i grew up in Baltimore but moved to Texas where boiler heat is non-existent
I have to explain what a boiler is to Texans
That song came on just as you got me thinking about it
Around these parts there aren't any real valves on the radiators to adjust the flow of hot water. In other parts they have thermostatic control valves so you actually can turn the heat up or down in the room if need be.
Feel his cold steal on my hot rod.
Right, I met that guy...
That's the thing I like about boilers vs furnaces. They have a tendency to heat the whole house evenly whereas a furnace it depends how far from the furnace you are how much heat you get. In my old house it didn't matter much as it was so small there weren't any long runs so the whole house heated quickly. Here there are long runs which don't provide much heat vs short runs that will roast you out. My bedroom is fortunately or unfortunately the shortest run in the house so I get all the heat in the winter which is bad for sleeping unless I close up the damper on the vent to force the heat to continue to the next room, then during the summer I get all the AC so that's good for sleeping but causes the condenser to run a lot longer to cool the rest of the house so we play the same game with the damper. The good thing about furnaces is the heat is almost instantaneous. The burner comes on and runs for about 2 minutes before the fan comes on but once it does you get lots of warm air that heats the house quickly. Boiler heat is just natural convection which may take a little longer to warm up a room.
Yes, that reminds me of a time a few years ago, maybe more than a few. Wif and I went out on a cold winter's night to eat at a nearby Thai restaurant. We've eaten there many times before. We were seated, fortunately (and maybe deliberately) by a floor register for heat, and that thing was absolutely chooching! That was nice indeed because it was really cold out.
I've also been to Sharkie's when the heat was on, and it's a furnace there too. The problem with both of those places is once it shuts off, the happiness is over until the thermostat calls for more. One time at Sharkie's we visited his brother, he was talking about his truck and how it has the automatic climate controls. This is the same system that's in my car so I could directly relate. He said "Once it reaches temperature, it goes cold! I want it to work like the manual controls, keep dumping the heat out until I turn it down.
With the boiler, oh yeah it takes longer but it stays longer as well. I don't have it as good as even older homes that had cast iron radiators. Those take forevermore to get hot, but once they do, they stay hot for a while.
With a ducted system with a blower, it's important to balance the system properly. My A/C system has dampers on the air handler for each run to each vent, since each one is a "home run" back to the air handler. They're hidden, I found them after reading about them and then indeed noticed they were there. I didn't know about them when I got those vent fans to blow more cold towards the dining room and kitchen. They did the trick entirely, so that solved that problem, but I'd have been wise to adjust those dampers to make sure those vents were full open and the rest were just partially closed. There are 2 vents in my office, early on, one of them was blowing way too much cold air. I found this magnetic thing that blocks off the vent, which I did very soon after moving in, not knowing about those dampers.
Now it's a funny thing, now that you bring it up and we're on the topic. When you were last here, you had shut the vents in the guest bedroom upstairs, which I had noticed after you left. No problem with that and of course you are welcome to do so. But--that actually clued me in to something. A few years ago we started using that room regularly, but before that I had the vents in that room closed off. Now I'm finding the A/C upstairs to be "not as adequate as it used to be" for lack of a better term. Well yes, with a whole extra room to cool off, that makes sense. Your shutting the vents also clued me in to something else--that room, despite being the farthest run, happens to cool off more than my bedroom where the thermostat is. I'd prefer it to be balanced so everything cools evenly. With those vents closed it does get warmer in that room in the summer but it's not bad. That means I need to go into the attic and see if the air handler upstairs also has those dampers, which I will then adjust to limit the chooch to the guest room, redirecting more air elsewhere. So your shutting those vents because you grow vertically instead of horizontally was actually a very good thing, and I will need to address that come A/C season.
Incidentally, balancing the system is a delicate act, and can take 24 to sometimes even 48 hours to feel a difference. Best to have thermometers in each room so you can read the temperature directly.
The key is also how well the ducts are insulated. Granted this was with A/C, but one time when Jay was here, we put the meat thermometer in the vents to see how cool the air was coming out. We tried both the vents closest and farthest from the air handler, and both were the same.
The central air hydronic I had was a cool system, but I like having furnaces now. One is because each floor has its own one now, and there is no longer any worry about water leaks, air in the lines, low pressure, expansion tanks, things like that. On our old system, if one of the valves didn't work, no problem, the other floors would still get heat, or you could manually open it to have the heat still go to that floor. But if something like the pump or burners didn't work, then the entire house had no heat. And the latter had that happen twice I believe.
Funny story though, one time in late 2004 or 2005, I got home from high school, I open the house door and immediately am hit with this like blast of heat. 1st floor heat was running, checked the thermostat, it was at 80. This was at the time before I knew as much as I do now about these things. I immediately shut off the thermostat.......no difference. I check the basement, sure enough the boiler and 1st floor air handler are still running. I'm completely at a loss and just had no clue what to do. Took me a couple of minutes until I remembered. We have an emergency switch at the top of the stairs! Hit that, boiler finally shut off, and eventually the air handler did as well. Turns out, what happened was, the 1st floor water valve was stuck open, and because of that, it mechanically thought it was still calling for heat even without the thermostat. The valve itself was fine, it was just its open/close device that was defective. But it was about 15 years old at the time, so I'd say it lasted.
One thing I do miss though. On the 2nd floor, once the boiler was all heated up, when it called for heat and the valve opened, the cooled water in the air handler's heat exchanger would go through the piping, which would immediately cool down the pipes in the hallway floor, which would cause creaking,.......stop...and then creaking again as it was replaced by the heated water behind it, heating them up again. At the boiler itself, you could feel this in the piping too. The only problem was, if the 1st floor was going, this cooled water could also make its way into the heat exchanger for that, trip the hydrostat and cause the blower to shut off. But it would usually come back on in a couple of minutes or so.
@jaykay18 at my mom's childhood house that's no longer around it used to have a single furnace in the middle of the floor. That was all heat you got. No central heat.
@@Sharkie626 All of the runs here are insulated by default, that's the kind of ducts they used.
That setup you had there was very interesting. Only one I have ever seen like that. Seems like quite a lot of equipment to achieve the same thing. It also seemed like the two systems didn't exactly "talk" to each other much either. It's kind of like the electric pressure cooker I have. The lid, which locks in place, does not talk to the electronics in the pot at all. One has no way of knowing what the other is doing. The lid locks mechanically, either based on the pressure of the steam or on the temperature, not sure which. The base has a sensor that can sense the temperature of the inner pot go above the boiling point. At that point, the only way that could happen is if the lid is on and has sealed and is building pressure, that would be the only way the temperature would go up. Then and only then, does the timer for the program set count down. And that all happens without one part talking to the other, not even through an interlock switch.
@@lexmarks567 That WAS central heat. It was centrally located. And yeah, many houses were heated that way back in the day. There's a place here called Bethpage Restoration Village, it's about American life in the olden days before 1900. I was forced to go there for my 4th grade field trip. They have replicated many of the same ways of life and you get to tour the different vintage building. They have people doing what they did back then, dressed the part, and they are knowledgeable and you can ask them questions.
They had a big cast iron stove most times, they kept it stocked with wood or coal, and it was centrally located. You did everything nearing it. Needed to cook? You'd put a pot on top of it. Iron clothes? No electric irons, but they had ones made out of cast iron, you';d put those on and let them heat up and then you could iron. With the exception of any electronics, including the telephone, they did everything we do today, just in a more Flintstones kind of way. Occasionally in certain buildings you'll spot a faux pas, a wireless access point. They might have mandated smoke alarms too being that it's open to the public.
I think central heating as we know it today was starting to catch on in the later 1800s. Some were even hydronic systems like mine but did not use circulator pumps because no electricity, they just allowed convection to take care of it.
My dad's house was built in 1956 and he said when he moved in, in 79, it still had a coal chute. The boiler used to be coal fired. The coal delivery man would show up, fill a wheelbarrow full or however it was measured, go around to the backyard, and dump it down the coal chute. The homeowner would have to feed the boiler coal as needed. Sometime in the 60s to 70s, oil was "the next big thing" so the boiler was converted to oil. In 1990 my dad converted it to gas. If they keep on with this green energy BS, they'll stop selling gas and force everyone to go electric. When that one blows over I guess we'll have to revert back to a hamster in a hamster wheel.
Those old boilers usually last almost forever as long as you keep them running in their "comfort zone" (as in not too cold and not too hot) and do at least some sort of maintenance on the system.
Newer systems aren't as well made as the old ones, mainly cause manufacturers usually cheap out and make important parts like the burn chamber heat exchanger out of aluminum to save costs. Luckily the boiler of my furnace is made out of stainless steel and only has minimal corrosion on it, so I hope it'll last a couple more years. I do expect the local government to be stupid and manually expire the natural gas distribution system way before the boiler here should have corroded through, but time will tell.
That's great to hear. I hope this keeps running for a long time. There's really not much to go wrong.
As for expiring the natural gas, that's a pretty hard sell. There would be a lot of trouble if they attempted that. They keep pushing these electric cars, that never worked in the past and it's not going to work this time either. They'll be around in some form, but I think we're going to see a lot more hybrids on the road. You can also blame your car insurance rates going up and up and up on electric cars. Tesla gets a rock ding on the battery, the cost to repair is too high and the entire car is written off. That money's got to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is our pockets.
I was switching between Ac and heat to around the 22nd to 23rd of november. Pilot lights are non-existent here now.
I did kick the air on a couple of times in Octember and early November, we were having a rather warm spell here. Those days are done, going to get cold now for the next month.
50 year old boiler? Heat pumps only hun! Gotta ditch that thing for electric heat pumps for true efficiency!
Come January, maybe not so much!