Octopus furnace
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
- This one describes the 100 year old, so called "Octopus furnace" that you may sometimes see when doing service on older homes. This video is part of the heating and cooling series of training videos made to accompany my websites: www.graycoolingman.com and www.grayfurnaceman.com to pass on what I have learned in many years of service and repair. If you have suggestions or comments they are welcome.
If you are a homeowner looking to repair your own appliance, understand that the voltages can be lethal, the fuels are highly flammable and high pressures are used. Know your limits.
The pre-1900 house we live in definitely used to have one of these.
Despite it being replaced before we bought the house, some of the original duct work -- including a few of the cast iron vents -- was left in place.
My house had a snowman furnace that was originally coal to oil then natural gas. I had a company remove it along with the insulated pipes.
It kept us warm in the winter, I remember sitting in front of the register in my bedroom and the pressure of the hot air coming out was more than you would think. The return was twice the size as shown and went to a wooden grate about 4ft x 3ft built into the side of the staircase base in the living room. When we got a gas furnace my mother would be upset, even with cheese cloth on the second floor registers the years of suit in the pipes would come out.
I have seen one of these still in operation, in Manchester, New Hampshire that’s converted to oil fired. It’s about 6/8 ft round
I remember in my friend's parent's general store, 3 lots down from Alan Shepard's parents house had one in the 70s.
Thanks for this video! I’m pretty sure my house had one of those based on the large ductwork that was here when I moved in and the large registers in the house, plus the coal chips scattered around on the dirt basement floor. We live in an historic district and am glad it was removed before I bought the house.
Serviced one 5 years ago still in operation today. In Ann Arbor, MI
Had one in our first place when we were married. Quiet and comfy
My uncle's house (built in 1920) had one of these.
Good Stuff!
very interesting, I've definitely never seen one of those.
My grandpa still has an OLD GE down firing oil boiler limping along, I thought that was old😅.
WE have to replace it though, some of the safety's are finally giving up the ghost.
Always wandered how they worked. Sometimes, I see parts of them left behind. 😊
We lived at a ranger station in a log house that was old in the 1950s. It had a gravity furnace that we fired with prestologs made from planer shavings at the local sawmill. The mill delivered them and slid them down a chute and stacked them in the basement. They cost about $18/ton. A local school had a stoker fed furnace that was fired with prestolog briquettes which were also bagged and sold as bar-b-cubes.
That’s very interesting historical perspective. Thank you for telling us about them. I wonder how many are still in use across the nation?
Growing up our home had one twice the size of the picture shown! It is now my brother's home it is still there and still heats the home!
I still repair these from time to time. Most are converted to oil. Many have had a blower cabinet added so that they are no longer gravity circulation. The stack temps on the converted ones with blower cabinet I have seen as low as 400 degrees. The asbestos removal means most people cannot afford to have them replaced. I even retrofitted a Carlin EZ-Gas to one in place of an old Midco Economite that no longer had parts available. I know of one that still has a Stewart Warner low pressure oil burner that uses the siphon nozzle. But they are very uncommon in my area. The vast majority of houses are steam or hot water. My own house is 2 pipe steam and I am in the middle of a boiler replacement to a Burnham Megasteam at the moment. Plenty of 100+ year old steam boilers still running here but not so much of Octopus furnaces. I'd much rather work on an old steam boiler than a furnace.
My 1920s house had one of those. Sometime during the 50s or 60s it was removed and replaced with a forced air natural gas furnace. House still has the huge return air grilles in the floor along the outside walls which are still used.
I will add that the house in the movie "A Christmas Story" also had one.
The trouble with converting to forced air is the original ducts and vents are not suitable for it. Even if the trunk lines are redone, branches still a problem in 2-story homes unless doing a major gut. 2-story homes with re-used gravity branch lines and vents, especially the ones with first and second floor vents on the same branch are freezing on the second floor.
The homes these gravity furnaces are in have no insulation and really need a total gut and re-insulation, re-ducting job and enormous expense.
The woman that owned my storage garage I rented.. in her cellar. She had one of those coal converted to gas .. gravity fed. No blower. A flame ring is what was used.
Ive always been fascinated by those really old oil burners.
This comment is a tad off topic. When you mentioned these as being inefficient, could you please do a video on "radiant celing" electric heat? What I meant as inefficient I really meant was impractical. Thanks
The reason why this was so inefficient was because a lot of the heat went through the vent
I used to have one in my 1930's Sears/Aladdin catalog house but it was removed before I bought it. Somebody "retrofitted" the natural draft vents to be hooked up with the forced air. . . which I need to now do "righter" but it's neet to see how these things used to work.
I still see these in operation today. I have repaired many of these over the years. Dirty bi-metal switches, sticking open mechanical motor gas valves or oiling the gas valve. Some had 100% outside return air. Some had retrofit blower motors.
Mrs jones it will be 10k for the removal and asbestos mitigation and 10k for the furnace install
I've serviced several of these here in Colorado Springs.
The owners are reluctant to swap them out mostly due to the costs of removing the asbestos tapes and insulation.
The removal is a problem due to the asbestos.
I think some of these just disappeared mysteriously after getting a price for its removal. Not advocating, just observing.
GFM
I had a really weird dream that a furnace like this was in my basement. I didn't even know this was real until I saw the video!
100 years ago, who needed or wanted to bother with efficiency when coal was $5 - $10 a ton and oil was a few cents per gallon. Most of the units I saw were oil conversions and were condemned due a crack in the heat exchanger, which was easily diagnosed when the blower (kit) came on, and you'd get a change in the draft over the fire. Basically, not worth the time to make a repair... so out it came. By the 1980s the cost for removal went up as regulations came into play for asbestos removal. Many of them are still collecting dust (sitting next to the new unit) because people didn't want to pay for that.
Both of my grand parents homes were heated with these and they were both "lump coal" that were later converted to stoker coal. I don't know why anyone would add a fan to these, they move air very well and made the house toasty warm. One point to make was that when possible the return would be on an outside wall under a double window, usually a pair on opposite sides of the house. They knew the cold air from these single pane windows would "fall" into the return. I was never cold at grandma's. There were two ways to regulate heat, both opened the damper at the bottom of the fire box. One used a chain connected to a knob upstairs...turning the knob pull the damper, this required you to close it, when warm enough. Better ones used a thermostat to control a reversible motor with a "bell crank" to automatically open and close the damper. Coal was always a dirty way to heat, and the walls in your home would quickly need paint. In the days before air conditioning, these were affordable for those who could not afford hot water systems.
We lived in a house that had similar unit but was hot water convection using those giant radiators in the living area. It had already been converted to Nat gas way before we moved in.
they were far more efficient, when compared to having fireplaces, wood/coal/oil burning units with multiple flues all sucking the heat out.
If you regulated the fire box air inlet and flue you could tame it down to heat ok and not throw as much out the chimney. Now compared to today's efficiency it sucks royally, although the efficiency could be brought way up using all sorts of trickery, it's just not worthwhile for the size and space it would consume.
I'd possibly keep one in place, if it was a seasonally used home/cabin where heat wasn't used often or only a hunting cabin or I guess as a non-functional conversation piece. lol
Had one when I was a kid. Fired with coal. I often wondered how much better it would have worked with a blower. I miss those days.
As a asbestos worker, all I see is asbestos tape on the joints
That reminds me of the old Coleman Model 700 I think it was in the little Spartan Mansion where I was raised and probably the reason I got Into hvac. It was a pot burner and was very efficient when it reached high fire That thing would really pump out some heat in the front room but the blower wasn’t much more than a combustion blower in cfm. But a 275 gallon tank would do all winter. Wish I had one in the garage sometimes now😅
I worked on a few of those. I thought they a bit goofy with all the pipes, but they did work fairly well.
GFM
My house has a big circle on my basement floor near my furnace. I believe it was from the coal fed octopus. My mom's house had a gravity fed boiler when I was young.
I saw a furnace / boiler ,? That was about 10 feet tall and 15 feet by 15 feet
The basement went down about 30 feet, and in the basement was a space dug out about 3 feet lower than the basement floor
The furnace was in that sunken area
It used coal
It was the thing of nightmares
It was built in this building that was a car dealership at the start of the 1900s
I think that something existed before the dealership
But the building was massive
It was about 1/4 of the city block
The building was from the street behind the main street and ran on the side street
Looking at the front of the building, you could see where the street was before, about 4 feet lower than it is now.
I don't know how this happened
I don't understand how the level of the street could have been built up, or why
Looking at the water pipes and the sewer pipes that were 30 feet down below the street or even deeper.
The one water pipe broke and it was 60 feet under the street
I don't know how they removed this huge metal, must have been iron, but they did
And the new furnace was a unit about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide
It just seems incredible how small the furnace is now compared to how big they use to be
And this was not the largest one I have ever seen
The largest, if you ever watch the movie Nightmare on Elm Street, a school I saw, they had a staircase outside that was concrete and went down about 4 stories and I know this is going to sound crazy
If I had not seen it I would never have believed it,
There were these 2 huge steel doors in the road in front of the school
A tractor trailer came
One that has the open top, that they load dirt of rocks into.
This one was loaded with coal
It has to have been at least 60 feet long
The driver pulled up just past the doors in the ground, got out, opened the doors, and there were control levers on the side behind the driver cab
He pulled a set of pins on the back of rig
He walked up to the front and pulled a lever and the back just behind the cab started to raise up
There was a giant hydraulic ram under the bed of the tractor trailer
The coal began to pour into the hole where the doors were open in the ground
The entire tractor trailer emptied into this hole
After he lowered the trailer back down, I looked in the hole, and it went down, at least 50 feet to top of the coal pile
I went down the stairs into the basement and through a massive metal set of doors and down a series of metal stairs and catwalks and opened another massive metal door
It opened to a catwalk around this thing that looks like the thing in Nightmare on Elm Street.
It had to be 30 feet high and 50 feet square and on the back side was a conveyor that led into the wall and the huge hole that was below the metal doors in the street, there was a silo , this massive silo, like the ones on farms that hold the corn, except this was underground and there was coal in it
In the basement was a maze of rooms and they had an apartment in the basement / sub basement that 3 janitors live in full time.
They had a kitchen with an electric stove, refrigerator, microwave, and bedrooms and chairs and a table and a living room with another refrigerator filled with beer, and easy chairs and a TV
At the back end of the basement, where the boiler was in the front under the gym and auditorium and office, and the apartment was under the first half of the school, the back half of the school, under it was a fallout shelter
They had a set of actual blast doors with the fallout shelter logo and they had a set of showers between the outer and inner blast doors
And in the shelter was all these metal bunk beds and drums and boxes stacked everywhere that had the OCD triangle and circle on them.
Some of them said water and others had numbers in yellow painted on them. And the cardboard boxes had the logo and numbers on them.
The school was not that old
It was built around 1950
It actually replaced the small school that was in town
It was a lot bigger than it needed to be at the time
They built the high school and about 1/4 mile away they built the Middle School and it was a carbon copy of the High School, so I would bet it had the same boiler and fallout shelter
They built new schools in the 3 counties, all like this, all at the same time.
They had stadiums and I don't know for sure but I would bet the fallout shelter extended under them
They must have planned to have the students go into the fallout shelter in the event of a nuclear war, but they never said anything about it.
I was lucky enough to be there on a Saturday and got to see this. It was not ever mentioned. I don't think anyone outside of the men who lived in the basement and the principal knew that they lived there.
The boiler needed constant attention, so they needed people living there
They never ran it during school hours
They would run it during the night and heat the building up.
When it was running it produced a massive amount of black smoke out the chimney and it " rained " little bits of coal down on everything
You would have these bits under your shirt and in your hair and when you took a shower it was a dirty mess in the shower.
Which is probably why they didn't run it during school hours
They had massive water tanks in the basement that held the steam / hot water ?
They had temperature gauges and pressure gauges and they were around 200 degrees
It was hot as hell in the building in the morning
But it cooled down by the afternoon
The one guy was honored in a ceremony by the district.
He had worked for the school for 40 years
He bought a new car and he bought a new house in Florida back in 80s.
He had come back from WW2 and got the job at the school and lived there for 40 years.
For a single guy, he made out pretty well.
He said they ate for free. They got food from the cafeteria and they had use of the school vehicles and were supplied uniforms and most of what they needed.
He had never owned a vehicle before he retired.
He said he hated the snow and he never wanted to see snow or be cold again.
He had money in the bank and his pension and Social Security and he had his retirement planned.
We should all be as lucky as he was.
I saw quite a few of these octopus furnaces when I first started working for the full service gas utility in St. Louis ,Missouri (early 1980s). These things were gas pigs and the gas bills related with them were astronomical. The sad thing is,the people that use these furnaces were the ones least likely to afford the gas bill. The standard high limit setting was 300° on these furnaces and the only failsafe other than the thermocouple. Many of houses burned down to the ground because of the failed high limits. I would think by the time I retired in 2018 , I would imagine all of them have been replaced or tagged out 🎉.
120 plus year old design, required no electric if hand fed, no moving parts, stone reliable. You have to think, there were large areas of the US that didn't have electric power, especially before the REA, and the REA didn't even start until the 1930's and I think it wasn't over until the 1050's. I'm in my 60's and I have friends who grew up without electric and running water
Just had that discussion the other day about friends growing up in a house without indoor plumbing, but most of those didn't have central heat either because a small place was easily heated with small stoves in a few rooms, plus a cookstove in the kitchen. The rural electrification bill gave most everyone power well before WWII, even if it was minimal.
I had this in my first house1920 double in 1985. Great heat and no blower noise. My father-in-law was a heating guy so he pulled it out for new gas with ac for wife and new baby in August 95 degrees. That winter all the plaster walls in back hallway s cracked do to lack of that octopus gravity heat. So anyone with a double should be aware of what might happen.fyi had to panel hallway
I know where there's still one of these in use (converted to gas) near Jackson MI. House will probably fall in before they replace the furnace.
In many years in the HVAC industry , I have run across a few gas steam boilers with single pipes to cast iron rads , The condensate returned by gravity . No pumps .
I have also seen those systems. Simple but inefficient.
GFM
Those are the most common type of system here. They are not inefficient system wise if a new boiler is retrofitted. Some of the new steam boilers are up to 86 percent efficiency. 2 pipe steam is more efficient but not by that much.
I think it would be a good idea to have all the models of them non working of course for display. They were scary.
Yay! Keep it up Grayfurnaceman 😂
I am shocked they can still be fixed. They still make parts for them?
only thing to replace is 24-volt gas valve and maybe a thermocouple.
All parts, except the heat exchanger are general replacement parts, so they are available. The problem may be finding a service tech that will work on it.
GFM
@@grayfurnaceman i worked on them, the last one i worked on was about 20 years ago. the owner was very old, i would expect that furnace got replaced when she passed on.
In 1953 my parents moved into a brand-new house with a new Bryant gravity gas furnace installed by the builder. In 1990 they replaced it with a new gas, forced air furnace. In the 1950s, 1960s, and even into the 1970s natural gas was cheap. So wasting 60% out of the chimney wasn't a big deal. In those 38 years of service, only one repair was made. The thermostat had to be replaced. The other two working parts, the gas valve and the pilot assembly, never failed. I would argue that in the long run (38 years) it was more
"efficient" than any of the junk units they make today with 65 working parts at 90% fuel efficiency and replacement after 15 or 20 years. Simple is always better.
There's something to be said for the price of your time. Set it and forget it means you can spend more time doing literally anything else. I like systems to be independent of each other. You lose electricity cause your cable breaks, life sucks but you're not freezing to death.
The price of natural gas has increased by double in the last 2 years.
GFM
@@grayfurnaceman not really sure where you’re getting your info ? As you can see it from my Henry hub data, the price of natural gas has been going down over the last two years (you may be thinking of 2021 & 2022 ).Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price - Historical Annual Data
Year Average
Closing Price Year Open Year High Year Low Year Close Annual
% Change
2024 $2.09 $2.56 $13.20 $1.25 $2.18 -15.50%
2023 $2.53 $3.64 $3.78 $1.74 $2.58 -26.70%
2022 $6.45 $3.74 $9.85 $3.46 $3.52 -7.85%
2021 $3.89 $2.60 $23.86 $2.43 $3.82 61.86%
2020 $2.03 $2.05 $3.14 $1.33 $2.36 12.92%
2019 $2.56 $3.25 $4.25 $1.75 $2.09 -35.69%
2018 $3.15 $6.24 $6.24 $2.49 $3.25 -11.92%
How did the pilot light work?
I'm wondering if anyone has a old oil burner hot water radiator heater. I can't open the door to clean it. It used to open until last year. Any ideas PM me If you can
What it must be a reproduction it's not covered in asbestos
These will be making a comeback after an EMP wipes out the grid.
Doom and gloom.
GFM