Tag: boiler

First Floor Progress

November 14, 2013 / / 0 Comments

We’re making headway on a number of different projects. The window company replaced the broken pane in our  new front door. The pattern of the privacy glass is a bit denser than the original, but it’s close enough. We got the clips and tape we needed to finish up the bay windows. The new clips are different than the other ones we had, so I had to do a bit of swapping to put them to best use, but the bay windows are now fully installed and flashed and Sarah put Great Stuff into the gaps around the windows. We need to go back around with the backer rod, but things are looking just about done on the window and door front.

Lester hung our new boiler on the wall in the basement and he’s run the venting for it, but there’s still a lot to be done. I ordered the radiators and Lester is getting all of the assorted pumps, valves, and pex we need to hook them up. It’s gotten cold fast, and we’ve been relying on electric baseboards to keep the house warm. It’s going to be a pricey electric bill this month, but hopefully we’ll have heat in the next few weeks.

Speaking of radiators, we disconnected the old radiators on the first floor and moved them to the back. We still need to get them out of the first floor, but one step at a time. Once we’ve got the upstairs radiators out as well, we’ll call a local company to sell them to. Hopefully someone else can use them.

We’ve also cleaned up the wood pile on the first floor. Most of it was from the old windows, including frames and trim. All of it was painted, most of it was rotted, and between the dimensions and all of nails, we haven’t been saving it. Some wood that is in small pieces and doesn’t have paint we’re saving for firewood, other stuff is more usable as fireblocking or future framing. In any case we’ve got some sorted stuff that needs to be moved to the basement, but it’s otherwise taken care of.

I’ve been talking to contractors about leveling the joists and putting in the new subfloor. I’m playing phone tag with one, another told us it was good enough and didn’t need to be leveled, and the third gave us a quote that was more than we expected. I’m contemplating doing the back section myself and seeing how it goes. If nothing else it would reduce the cost and give us a place to put all of the stuff.

Our neighbors in the crappy house to the North moved out and the house was bought by a broker who is planning to convert it into a single family, though probably a lot faster than we’re doing it. We’re excited that there will be a nicer house next door, but it will also be a little disheartening if there’s is started and finished and ours is still putzing along.

Finally, our next big project is removing the chimney. I went up on the roof for the first time and took stock of things. It honestly doesn’t look like it will be terrible. While I was up there I took down an old antenna that was literally in the chimney and not attached to anything. More scrap metal! We’re planning to tackle the section of chimney above the roof this Sunday. The goal is to get enough taken out that we can repair the roof. At that point we can take it down from the inside, floor by floor.

Momentum

October 25, 2013 / / 0 Comments

We put in the last two bay windows last week, meaning all of the first floor windows are in, aside from the sliding door that we have to hold off on. I need a few more strap anchors and some more flashing tape to call the last window done, and we still have to go around with the Great Stuff and backer rod to complete the air sealing. In addition, Lester, our radiant heating guy, finished the rough-in work ahead of our new boiler installation. It’s been a lot of work but it’s also a very tangible feeling of progress that we’re eager to keep up.

Derek helping

Derek checks for square

Our next major goal is to get the new subfloor installed. We need that done in order to start a whole host of first floor projects like framing interior walls, building the new stairs,  insulating the exterior walls, and getting the radiant floor heating installed. With the weather getting colder day by day, it’s those last two in particular that have our interest piqued.

With so much riding on the subfloor, and the time required to level the wonky floor joists, we’ve decided to hire it out. I’m working on getting quotes this week and hopefully we’ll get some good numbers and people. We’ll need to set to work clearing out the first floor. It’s accumulated an impressive pile of scrap wood from the removing the old windows, plus the giant steel pallet the door shipped on, the sliding glass door we can’t install yet, and all of our tools.

The other thing standing in the way of new subfloor is the radiators, steam pipes, and chimney from the old boiler. The old boiler is disconnected, and so far we’ve been making do with electric heaters. We’ve been reluctant to remove it because it’s still a viable way to heat the house if the new boiler takes longer to show up than the freezing weather.

In short, we’ll get started clearing things out and see how things play out. Hopefully we’ll get our new boiler in quickly and the chimney and pipes will come down before they’re in the way of the subfloor contractor. Worst case, we’ll have to hook the old boiler back up and the contractor will have to wait or work around some things. Either way, things are moving and we’re getting excited.

Mechanical Room Preparation

July 10, 2013 / / 0 Comments

With the hot water heater question sorted, I need to get the area of the basement that the water heater and boiler are going into ready. Eventually this will be the mechanical room… when we frame out the basement, after we lower the basement floor, after we finish the rest of the house. We already ran gas line, but there are still a few things to be done.

Mechanical room wall

Mechanical room wall

The boiler will be hung on the wall, and since the basement isn’t framed out that means it’s going on an outside wall. We don’t want to mount it directly on the brick because we want our house insulated and air sealed. That means we need to frame the outside wall where the boiler and panel will go. However, because we’re going to eventually lower the basement floor, we can’t just put a sill plate of the wall on the floor, we need to attach the studs to the brick wall. To ensure air and moisture management, we’ll use sill gasket behind the studs and fill the holes with caulk. The area between the studs we’ll fill with closed-cell spray foam.

Before any of that can happen, I need to prepare the wall. As is typical of our house, years ago someone saw a problem and went out about fixing it the wrong way. In this case, moisture problems with the brick foundation wall were not corrected by fixing gutters, redirecting storm water, or repointing the brick, they were “fixed” by slathering (parging) mortar or cement all over the brick wall on both sides in an effort to water seal it. This is generally a terrible idea because it traps water in the brick, rotting it from within. The ineffectiveness of this strategy is revealed by the coat of paint they put over the finished product which is now bubbled up and crumbling off.

So I’ve been removing the parging with my rotary hammer in chisel mode and a pry bar. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but the wall does need to be plumb. While the brick itself is pretty straight, the parging is thick enough in places to make for a wonky wall. Removing it is tricky because the parging doesn’t want to come off and it’s easy to damage the brick itself.

I also need to run electrical from the panel to the mechanical room. Chicago code requires EMT conduit, and in this case it’ll be ¾” because I need to run several circuits (lighting, hot water heater, boiler and pump, smoke detector, and eventually the air handler and HRV). I’m hoping to get both the wall prep and the electrical done by this Monday. With that out of the way we can get the hot water heater installed and focus on the remaining tasks for the boiler prep.

Choosing a Water Heater

June 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

For a while now I’ve been planning to get a Triangle Tube Smart Series indirect water heater. Indirect water heaters use the boiler to heat the water rather than have built-in heating elements. Lester, our radiant heating guy, agreed that it was a good design but cautioned that there can be issues with getting them approved by inspectors because they don’t have a double walled heat exchanger. I looked into the code and determined that we shouldn’t have an issue with that, but for a number of other reasons I wound up looking at other water heaters anyway.

The first is simplification. Our project is really complicated, with a set of interlocking pieces with dependencies and requirements across the gamut. Our existing water heater is in the way of our new boiler panel installation, so if we use an indirect water heater, we need to first move our existing water heater (disconnect everything, move it, and run water and gas plumbing to the new location along with exhaust flue to the chimney). Then we’d get the new boiler installed along with the indirect water heater, and re-plumb the water lines to the new location. We wouldn’t be able to remove the chimney until the new system was fully up and running. Conversely, if we just buy a standalone water heater, we can install it soup-to-nuts and be done with it. The boiler install loses any other dependencies, the chimney isn’t waiting on anything else, and we don’t have a single point of failure (the boiler) down the road.

There’s a few other factors to consider. For one thing, when the home is tightly insulated our heating load will be quite low. Having an indirect water heater actually means we’d need to buy a bigger boiler. The boilers modulate, meaning they can run at different levels depending on load (25%-100%), but if the boiler needs to be bigger just to run the water heater, that 25% is still a much bigger value. Our plumber, Mariusz, recommended the AO Smith Vertex 100, and it’s easy to see why. It’s 96% efficient, it’s reliable, we’ll never run out of hot water, and it’s direct vent, so it uses outside air for combustion, which is important when we’re doing so much air sealing.

I’ve already decided against tankless. They draw too much gas (up to 199,000 btu) and they don’t work well in the Midwest where our cold water can be 50° F or less. I’ve decided against tankless hybrids since they seem unreliable. I’ve ruled out most of the other condensing storage models because they either cost more, produce less, are less reliable or some combination thereof. There are cheaper models that direct vent but in addition to not having as much capacity (first hour delivery not tank size), they’re more than 40% less efficient, easily costing more over their lifetime.

Vertex 100

Vertex 100

In the end, I did a cost comparison. The Smart Indirect is the cheapest until you factor in the cost of a bigger boiler. A lower efficiency direct vent water heater is cheap until you factor in the operating cost. The Vertex 100 is expensive, but its high efficiency will pay for itself. I also looked at a more expensive direct vent heater that had a stainless steel tank so it would last longer, but the payback wasn’t there. I’ve reached out to Mariusz to get the ball rolling. In the mean time our whole-house water filter showed up and I need to frame out the mechanical room wall.

Boiler Update

October 19, 2011 / / 1 Comment

The weather has been especially fickle as of late. After my initial test firing of the boiler it promptly got warm again and stayed that way for a couple of weeks. When it got colder again, I went to fire up the boiler. Since it worked fine the first time, I didn’t anticipate any problems. Unfortunately, the initial success was not reproducible. I suspected the gas control knob since it had been –shall we say– sticky. In order to find out I had to get a multimeter so I could trace back the electrical connections.

Things seemed to be good. I was getting current, though it seemed a bit erratic, and there wasn’t a clear reason that the burner wouldn’t light. I redo all of the wiring because it was a mess, with old cracked wire and lots of places that could be shorting. Even so, nothing was working. A few days went by and I was running out of things to check and the house was getting cold. Then, Sarah sends me a video while I’m at work.

I ask her to disconnect the thermostat and when I get home I can no longer get any signal from the transformer. So I ordered a new transformer. The house gets colder and colder until we can see our breath while watching TV. Have I mentioned there’s no insulation in this house? Despite paying for rush shipping, the part takes almost a week to arrive.

I install the new transformer and sure enough, the weather suddenly gets warm and then hot. With it eighty degrees in the house, I can’t easily test the system, so I move on to other things. Then this past week, it starts to get cold again. I flipped the switch on the thermostat, went downstairs… and nothing was happening. Incidentally, somewhere in this process I learned that the system is steam, not hot water, so while there is a cold water feeder, it isn’t powered. Everything just runs low voltage.

I break out the multimeter again and test voltage at each connection. Nothing. No juice at all, even out of the new transformer. I test the power coming into the transformer, and the line tester beeps affirmative. It doesn’t make sense. I test resistance between the terminals of the transformer and confirm it isn’t shorted. Finally, I disconnect the new transformer to inspect it and make sure I’m not missing something. Everything looks fine.

Unsure what else to try, I hook the transformer back up. I’m not sure what I did differently, but this time the transformer was live. I connected the wires, testing at each point with the multimeter. Signal is getting through the pressure cutoff, but when it gets to the low water cutoff switch, it stops. It’s in alarm state. The strange thing is that I know the low water cutoff works. If I drain water from the system, it fills it back up. There seems to be a problem with the mechanism that connects the switch to the actual water feeder. According to the documentation, it could be several things, with different parts to replace. Since I know the low water feed is working, I take the chance and simply bypass the switch.

The last stop for the wire is the gas control valve. I turn off the thermostat and reconnect the valve. I relight the pilot. I run back upstairs and switch on the thermostat. As I come back down the stairs I can hear it: the boiler is firing. Finally.

Sarah and I went back upstairs and watched tv. In about half an hour we started hearing noises from the radiators. They started getting warm. They hissed a little. The pipes banged. Most importantly, the house got warm. I checked pressure, made sure it shut off when it reached the right temperature, and it’s continued to work beautifully –if noisily– the last few days. It just needs to make it through this winter. Next year we’ll start work on our massive HVAC undertaking. For now, we have heat. All it cost me was time and about twelve dollars for the transformer.