A day defined by water leaving pluming in other-than-specified ways

[xiphias]

vonbeck mentioned a couple days ago that the furnace in the basement which heats his floor was having some steam leaks. It's an OLD furnace and caught on fire once, but I managed to bodge it back together well enough to get another season out of it.

Just a little technology note: we have steam heat, with radiators.

Radiators are heat sinks. Radiators in computers are designed to take heat from computer chips and move the heat to outside the computer case, cooling the inside. Household heating radiators are designed to take heat from the furnace in the basement and move it to the living areas. They work the same way -- the purpose of one is to cool a hot spot, and the purpose of the other is to warm a cool spot, but it's the same thing. It just depends whether you care about ONE end or the OTHER end.

I assume MOST of you know what steam radiators look like, but some of you may not, if you've always lived in houses that had forced-hot-air, baseboard water radiators, or radiant floor heating. Most houses that have central air conditioning, for instance, will also have central heating -- you can heat the air, or cool the air, and then send the air right through the same ducts.

Anyway, household steam radiators look something like this:

Steam goes in through the pipe on one end, and fills up the radiator, and the heat of the steam radiates from all of those fins, and the steam cools to water, and drains out the other pipe. Pretty simple.

The steam is generated in a furnace, usually in the basement. In our basement, we have THREE furnaces, because our house was set up as three apartments, with three separate utilities bills.

Each furnace is a box in the basement which is attached to the water line, and the gas line both.

First, the thermostat in the apartment detects that the apartment is colder than the desired temperature. In our house, this is done through an electronic thermostat, but, before we replaced it, it used to be done through a mechanical thermostat. The mechanical thermostat -- that's the round thing with a dial on it -- has a bi-metallic thermometer. What that is: take two strips of metal that expand at different rates when heated. Weld them together. Because the expand at different rates, the welded-together strip will bend into different curves at different speeds. So you can have that strip turn a dial, which will tell you what the temperature is.

In a mechanical thermostat, you've got a couple of different dials. One shows you what temperature it is (by that bi-metallic strip), one shows you what temperature you want it to be (just by where you've turned the dial to). In back, the two dials are connected by a third little doohickey. If the two numbers are the same, or if the "actually is" temperature is higher than the "desired" temperature, the doohickey leans one way. If the actual temperature is colder than you want it to be, the doohickey leans the other way.

In that doohickey is a mercury trigger, which is a little vial of glass (sealed) with a little bit of mercury in it. And, coming off the end of that vial of glass are two wires, which also poke through into the glass. When the vial is tipped one way, the mercury rolls over to ONE end of the vial, and covers the ends of both wires, which completes a circuit. If it vial is tipped the OTHER way, the mercury goes to the OTHER end, leaves the ends of the wires exposed, and DOESN'T complete the circuit.

So, you have this thing where, if you want to be heating up the room, the circuit is completed, and, if you don't, the circuit is broken.

The electronic thermostats do something similar, but I don't know how they work, because I don't know electronics.

Okay, so, in any case, down in the basement, you have a circuit completed somehow. This means that the furnace should now start heating things up.

There is water in the boiler of the furnace. There's an automatic valve in the boiler, such that, if the water in the boiler gets low, it automatically puts more water in. Underneath that boiler, there's a big burner, kind of like a stove burner, but shaped differently.

Once the furnace gets the "completed circuit" message, it opens a valve, and gas starts flowing into the burner, and gets ignited. The gas burns, and heats up the water in the boiler, which boils, and goes through the steam pipes, and fills up all the radiators, and the heat from the radiators goes out into the rooms, and the steam condenses and drips back to the basement and goes back into the boiler, and, eventually, the rooms heat up, and the thermometer heats up, and the metal strips expand and tilt the doohickey, and the mercury flops to the other end of the vial, and the circuit is broken, and there's no signal saying "burn gas now", and the valve closes and the water stops boiling.

So that's how a steam radiator heating system works. It's simple, it's middlin' efficient, it's pretty reliable.

But, over time, things can go wrong. Natural gas burns perfectly clean, however, dust bunnies don't. Over time, you get dust bunnies in your furnace, which burn, and cause soot, which can cause problems. And joints can loosen up, and leak steam.

The first-floor furnace was getting real close to the end of its lifespan, and when marquisedea went into the basement the other day, she saw steam venting into the basement, and it smelled damp. She called the fire department to come deal with it, which was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Speaking as a landlord: I really like it when my tenants do things which make it less likely for bad things to happen.

The fire department came, turned off that furnace, and tagged it with a "DO NOT TURN ON THIS FURNACE UNTIL IT'S SERVICED BY A LICENSED HVAC PERSON".

So, now we have to find a good HVAC person, or, far better, we need to get that sucker out, throw it away, and put a new system in. The one that they just tagged is REALLY not worth fixing.

New furnaces cost about a thousand dollars. I think we can probably deal with that, but it's not fun.

Then I started doing laundry.

And I heard spurting water after a time.

I think I figured out where THAT'S coming from, too. See, most of the time, when you hook up plumbing, you hook up your drains so that he waste water flows down. "Down" is a good way to get things to flow, because it's hard to get things to flow "up".

However, sometimes, it's unavoidable. Sometimes, the only way to fit something where you want it is to have the waste water flow "up". So they have "drain pumps". These are pumps which suck the water you need to get rid of into a bucket, and then pump the water out of the bucket UP, until you can get it to a place where the water can go DOWN.

I think the water is backing up in the drain pump. Oy.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

This is bad, but I'm picturing a couple of guys running around your basement jumping up and whacking the overhead joists in hopes coins will fall out.

Seriously, that sucks. I know a good plumber but he's in New Jersey. :-/

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Thanks a lot. Now I've got the music stuck in my head.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

Oog. Good luck with this.

[vonbeck.livejournal.com]

Yes, something is leaking, I have water coming out the light fixture
in my bedroom ceiling

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That's probably just overflow from my bathroom. I've turned off the water.

[hotpoint.livejournal.com]

Oh geez. Best of luck with several plumbing failures at once!

I had good luck when my furnace's input gas valve died with Lancer Contracting in Belmont (+1 617 489 2555); I don't think they're the cheapest, but the guy who visited had good diagnostic skills--knew his way around with a multimeter and didn't replace parts just to see what was broken--and was meticulous about the annual service I asked him to do as well.

FWIW, electronic thermostats use a thermistor as a temperature sensor, which is a calibrated temperature-sensitive resistor. Several methods can be used to determine the resistance, and a table lookup turns that resistance into a temperature, which is compared against the stored temperature in the microcontroller's memory, and opens or closes the thermostat's relay appropriately.

[ron_newman]

I did not know it was even possible to control radiated heat with a thermostat. I don't have one, and often get too much heat.

[sarianna.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the lesson (UMass has its own steam plant, actually)....and good luck with the cleanup. :-\

[practicallyfame.livejournal.com]

I have radiators like the one pictures.

I've never truly understood how they work, though I had a concept in my head, vaguely like the one you just described.

I want to thank you for the full explanation. I actually learned something useful today.

And good luck.

[marquisedea.livejournal.com]

Yaaay for firemen!

Oh, is that why all the clothing in both washers in the basement comes out soaking wet?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

No, that would be a separate problem. *Grumble*.

[vonbeck.livejournal.com]

If you manually set the cloths through a second spin cyle it gets them
much drier (just about normal)

[marquisedea.livejournal.com]

So weird...thanks!

[rebmommy.livejournal.com]

"Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink" as my Aunt Selma (whose yahrzheit is coming up) used to say. I am impressed with your explanation of how a mechanical thermostat works! Have you found a good plumber yet?

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday Ian!

[redknight.livejournal.com]

I think you're confusing how steam systems work with how hot water systems work. Steam radiators usually have one pipe, which is used for both feed (steam) and return (condensate). Hot water radiators have two pipes, one for the feed (hot water) and one for return (less hot water).

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Nope, I'm not. The steam radiator is not a completely closed loop. MOST of the steam re-condenses, but some goes out the radiator vent hole, which is why houses with steam radiators are less dry than other types of heat.

But it IS a loop. Take another look at your radiators -- they should have two pipes coming out of the floor.

[redknight.livejournal.com]

My house has forced hot air heating, but my previous apartment (6 years back) had steam heat with only one pipe to the radiators.

Poking around web I see that we're both right. There are both one pipe AND two pipe steam systems.